Developing good problem solving skills is an important element of an Information Technology (IT) education. A challenge is how to expose students to such skill sets practically and efficiently, and one means is to use programming. Teaching programming to IT students has always been a complex proposition. Many students shy away from programming because they fear its level of difficulty and don’t feel it is something needed to be successful in industry. Over the past four years, we have introduced a series of programming courses that have been carefully tailored for IT students. Specifically, we introduced a course in Data Structures and a course in Programming Languages as electives along with refining a required course in Introduction to Programming. In this paper we describe each course and highlight some of their unique characteristics. We conclude with observations of the impact the focus on programming has had on the overall IT curriculum.
