I wanted to follow up on my earlier post on why teaching CS still matters. In that post, I cited a couple of former students. Not only former students but particularly high achieving ones. One friend commented on that - the idea that my thesis may makes sense for those high achievers but not everyone. I maintain that CS, if taught right is still important for all students. It's about thinking and problem solving and that exploring programming can help build those thinking and problem solving skills.

Still stuck in St. Louis and still haven't finished my SIGCSE series but there have been a few threads in the various CS Education groups about the big changes in code.org and how AI might be making learning CS the way we've been teaching it obsolete. Rubbish and here's a couple of stories as to why. Let's go back to the start of this century. 9/11 had just placed America into a state of shock.

It seems that every year or so we have a discussion as to what's the best programming language to teach first. I thought today I'd look at a variation of that question. What language features should we teach, when and why. I was thinking about this after someone in my StuyCS alumni community asked about which Java version was used in APCS. He was tutoring a current Stuy student and was wondering about language features.