we started with scheme, then C and then C++

What about C?

In my engineering program everyone started with C and I'm actually glad in retrospect.

Gives you a good understanding of the whole stack.

C is better than C++ but I think you can more gently introduce people to programming with an easier language like python or ruby and move on to C to learn memory management and typing once they understand variables, functions, basic logic etc

But we generally teach computer science instead of just programming so we don't have separate classes