The day 2 keynote was really a treat. After giving out the years SIGCSE awards, instead of getting a standard talk, all three recipients, Jonathan Mwaura, Mitchel Resnick and Manuel Pérez-Quiñones participated in a fireside chat with Dan Garcia. The only letdown was that since Dan was moderating the chat, we also didn't get his views into the mix.

With three independent voices, the chat pushed in a few different directions but the theme that spoke most to me was when Pérez Quiñones, commenting on what the future held for CS Education said "I hope the future is less so we can do more." The gist being that college CS curricula has become really bloated.

Of course, it's much more than that and at the same time the statement is pretty nuanced.

On the one hand, CS Curricula has become more and more packed. Course after course has been added while none have been removed. Now, that's not entirely true. I seem to recall that Compilers was a frequently required course back in my day and that's no longer the case but what about operating systems? Does every undergrad need a 3 credit OS course? What about the core sequence? Is it necessary to implement every sort? If not, how many, which ones and why? I'll return to this question when I write up some of the individual sessions.

Maybe we could take the important parts of all the current classes, ditch the cruft and distill it all down to fewer requirements. This would allow programs to more comfortably add in some of the new topics that might currently not fit - software engineering, HCI, Ethics, stuff relating CS to the humanities, and more.

Another spin on this was the question of what would or should remain in CS and what would spin off? Should their be a separate Software Engineering Major? What about AI? How about CS classes for non majors? Should all of this be in CS or should CS become a small program that just focuses on the theoretical core?

I don't thin the panelists nor the audience were or are ready to propose a hard answer here but I'm really glad the questions were raised.

Coincidentally, or maybe not, Mark Guzdial just wrote a post asking a related question, his focus being on CS for non CS majors. Alfred Thompson responded with his related thoughts on the High School level.

For the high school level, I feel that our job for all students is three fold. Give them enough of a background to as a lay person understand the fundamentals of CS. Give them some practical tools (ie. programming) that they can employ regardless of their future path, and finally provide inspiration for those who sync with CS so that they can take future courses and pursue CS (or more likely software engineering) as a field of study.

This is what we do, or try to do in most other subject areas. Everyone takes Biology. They learn a bit about the field, they learn something about the field that's in theory relevant to their lives and hopefully some will be inspired to study more advanced bio either in the upper High School grades or beyond.

I think we did and are doing a very good job with this at Stuy where I designed a course specifically for this around 25 years ago. AP CS Principles could be this but while I've seen some solid implementations, I've also seen far too many weak implementations.

College is another matter and is tricky. Should everyone take a CS0? Should it be focused on majors, non majors, or try to do both? Should CS departments run a whole bunch of intros? There is at least one college that does this - I'm blanking on the name, and it seems to work very well for them. On the other hand, this leads to all sorts of resource questions. Another option is for other departments to take over intro CS courses appropriate for their disciplines.

No easy answers but I'm super happy that the conversations are starting. Nothing will resolve itself any time soon as education moves slowly but as they say, the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago, the second best time is now.

There were other topics addressed in the chat - CS education for giving everyone agency. Not merely using all the modern tools and advances to do the same thing better but to move closer to the type of world we want to live in.

AI of course also came up with Pérez Quiñones talking about how having copilot took away a teaching moment between him and a student - something I've seen myself with older code help tools.

I'll talk more about my thoughts about what belongs in CS and were it belongs in another post and might also share my thoughts on Mark and Alfred's posts but for now, I've got to say, this was my favorite keynote in a long time.