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. I was home and I heard from a former student - one who graduated in '96. I'll call him Steve since I can't check to see if he's okay with me revealing his identity until later.

Steve knew that Stuy was right near the Twin Towers so he wanted to check to see if I was okay after the traumatic events. I also asked how he was doing. It turned out he was in Texas. Since graduating college he had joined the Blackstone group. He was working on the Enron thing. If you don't remember or are too young to know, check out the link. This was a big, complicated mess. Enron owned a huge number of companies and the debt and ownership relationships were nuts.

My guy Steve was the only junior guy on the team. The rest? Experienced business people with MBAs and tons of experience and similarly experienced people with doctorates in Economics or similar. I forget what Steve's major was in college but he both studied CS with me at Stuyvesant and also knew a bunch more from self study.

Now, forgive me but my memory is a little fuzzy. I forget if what he told me was what he already did or if it unfolded over the next few weeks and then I got the update but the gist is the same. I'll go with the assumption that the events I'm going to share here had already happened.

I asked him how they were going to deal with the situation. Steve said that after a considerable amount of time, all the senior team members were stumped on any quick resolution an figured they'd be down in Texas for months trying to figure things out and even then, they weren't sure.

My guy had different plans. He went back to his hotel room, took out his laptop, wrote up some code and a short time later, well, maybe not as short as now since computers and specifically laptops were slower back then, problem solved and Steve was written up in some Wall Street publication as the next "Wall Street Wiz Kid!"

The thing is, Steve looked at the problem through the lens of a computer scientist.

Now, you might say - but now with AI, anyone could just ask for the solution. Nonsense - back then, all those senior people could have come up with a solution and then grabbed a programmer to implement it

The key was that Steve could think and problem solve from a computer scientists point of view and that gave him the edge. All the AI in the world wouldn't have helped that Blackstone team had Steve - the guy who could think and problem solve like a computer scientist was not on the team.

Fast forward another ten or so years. I was talking to another former student. He was a lawyer. Attended Harvard Law and was now at a powerful law firm.

Randomly during out chat, he said, "You know, the most important class I ever took to prepare me was your intro CS class." I was a little surprised. That was the 10th grade class that used Racket and NetLogo as implementation languages but I always thought the class was more about thinking and problem solving than about just programming.

He said that both now professionally and during law school, he had an edge. Everyone in his classes and his firm could think like a lawyer but he could also approach problems like a computer scientist.

That's the win.

Over the years I've heard this again and again from my students who haven't gone into tech. I've also heard from the ones in tech how the value of that and other classes I've taught were not just about the language and the vocation of programming but of thinking and problem solving.

Of course I didn't reach everyone in this way - I've also had students who just feel that "you taught me Java" but that's okay.

The importance of teaching CS if we teach it right is the thinking and the problem solving. Programming can continue to be a tool to develop these skills in young minds and AI can and will be incorporated in the process. The kids who's teachers and schools get the mix right will be at a big advantage to those that don't.

So, don't let the naysayers diminish the value of our field. We've got to advocate for why CS is just as important as it ever was if not more so.

Code.org will do whatever Code.org does. So will the College Board and CSTA. They might make great choices for our field or they might make horrible ones. As teachers, it's our job to continue to advocate for what's right for our kids.