So last week I completed my second and final week back at Stuy teaching CS. We spent Monday finishing up the mode lesson and then spent most of the week on this topic - writing a computer program to automatically decode something "encrypted" with a Caesar Cipher. The post I just linked to was from when I first taught the lesson. I've refined and reworked it considerable since then but the gist is the same.

As you might have heard, I'm back at Stuyvesant teaching. Not permanent or full time - just covering for a CS teacher who's on grand jury duty. She's out for three week but since I was at SIGCSETS for the first one, I'm only covering for two. Last week and the one upcoming. I wouldn't be covering all 5 of the teacher's classes, just 3 - periods 6, 7, and 8, the second half of Stuy's intro CS class.

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.