By all means, introduce students to coding using the easiest, most engaging method possible. To me, that's seeing something big, visual, and getting right into the code as soon as possible, like using an IDE with a mostly working sample project they just need to finish something easy in.
Thing is, a good course should then, at some point, force the learner to understand what's happening under the hood, or at the very least, be interesting enough to draw them to want to understand it.
I don't really use eclipse, but the Visual Studio example, it would be as simple as looking at the output window after hitting "run" and walking through what the IDE is actually doing in the background.
By all means, introduce students to coding using the easiest, most engaging method possible. To me, that's seeing something big, visual, and getting right into the code as soon as possible, like using an IDE with a mostly working sample project they just need to finish something easy in.
Thing is, a good course should then, at some point, force the learner to understand what's happening under the hood, or at the very least, be interesting enough to draw them to want to understand it.
I don't really use eclipse, but the Visual Studio example, it would be as simple as looking at the output window after hitting "run" and walking through what the IDE is actually doing in the background.