Introduction to Programming with Pseudocode In the University in which I will start teaching the course sequence for Programming goes in this way:


Algorithms and Data Structures
Structured Programming Languages
Object-Oriented Programming Languages


So as you see, the first contact of the students with Programming is the "Algorithms and Data Structures" course in which several programming fundamentals topics are covered (variables, data types, if/else, loops) and also some data structures and basic algorithms. The weird part -at least for me- is that in this first course there no actual programming: all the topics are covered with Pseudocode and Flowcharts written in the Blackboard.

This seems kind of strange for me, and as a new teacher I have little power to change this (Senior teachers said that coding is for latter courses). So, I want to know if any of you is familiar with that teaching approach and if you can suggest me some textbooks that are using that teaching methodology.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
This is exactly the approach taken by the Introduction to Algorithms course at MIT—or at least it was the case back in the early 2000's. The book by Cormen et al. takes a decidedly agnostic approach to programming, and presents everything in terms of pseudocode, rather than adopting any particular programming language.