The class actually sounds completely cool. I understand why the OP’s daughter wanted to take it, and why so many others did, too. It’s really an amazing opportunity – two professors, one tenured the other ladder-tracked, and two TAs, with 15 students, and essentially about the research that the professors are doing right now, with a week-long field trip in Europe thrown in. That’s why the student is so upset about her problems in the class, and so reluctant to withdraw.
It’s silly and dangerous to draw definitive conclusions from online discussions like this. But my instinct is in line with Purple Titan’s in #52: It’s not that the OP’s daughter doesn’t have enough programming background, but more like she is making some missteps on basic concepts that could easily be corrected, and panicking about it. And she hasn’t been effective in asking for help, perhaps in large part because whatever it is she’s not understanding is really fundamental and simple, which is the hardest kind of problem to diagnose. The two professors taught some version of the same course the past three years at least. If it were really inappropriate for first year students with no programming background, they would have figured that out a while ago.