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.