Unfortunately, CS at my school just wasn't designed for those who had no clue how computers worked. My 1st year, there was a group of people who excelled, and everyone else did horribly. Personally, I started turning in Windowed apps instead of console apps out of boredom.

When I started CS1 (Beginning C++), I already knew BASIC, Turbo Pascal, and x86 assembly, not to mention experience with macro programming and CASIO and TI calculator programming and had many years of programming experience, so it was a blowoff course for me. The thing is that the hardest part about learning your first programming language is learning what to tell the computer to get it to do what you want. By the third or fourth, you quickly reallize that the only real differences between languages is the syntax: how you tell the computer what you tell it.