Programming in an undergraduate business curriculum

Abstract

This paper is about teaching programming to business students on an undergraduate level. These students tend to consider information technology (IT) and information systems to be rather abstract and difficult subjects. Despite the fact that young business undergraduates have a good grasp of the use of modern information technology, their interest in how this technology actually works seems to be quite limited (Burns, Gao, Sherman, Vengerov, & Klein, 2014). The approach described in this paper is to use an information systems standard textbook such as Laudon and Laudon and the standard curriculum of a foundational information systems course (Topi et al., 2010) as a basis for designing the course curriculum, but to somewhat limit the time spent on these subjects. The time saved is then spent on teaching some computational thinking (Wing, 2006) and programming (coding, using Python). In the past two years, the author has taught this content to 127 undergraduate students in a trinational Bachelor program