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.

Over a month since my last post. Wow. Anyway, last week was full of Artificial Intelligence events. On Wednesday, I attended a talk by Ray Kurzweil, hosted by Trinity High School - a posh private school on the Upper West Side, The Academy for Teachers, and Teach for America. Thursday was a StuyCS event which was really about early stage startups but much of the discussion revolved around AI and Friday was a meeting of CUNY CS educators where the topic of the day was, of course, AI - I was there to pitch, well, Pitchfest.