Teaching programming skills to finance students: how to design and teach a great course

It is always my firm belief that an ambitious finance-major student should master at least one computer language. This is especially true for students from quantitative-finance, MSF, business analytics or financial engineering programs. Among many good languages, R and Python are the two best ones. Based on my 6-year experience of teaching R to finance students at 3 schools, the following 7 factors are critical for designing and teaching such a course: strong motivation, a good textbook, a hands-on environment, data intensive, a challenging term project, tons of supporting R data sets and an easy way to upload those R data sets.