Last Thursday, I was back at Stuy. I was there along with members of the Alumni Association to host Stuy's first tech meetup of the season. I guess that's the first "official" project I'm working on since retirement. In the past, there had been various issues with Stuy's assorted alumni associations (yes, there were at one time three competing entities) but for the past few years they've been under what we can call "new management" - people I both like and trust so I'm happy to be working with them.

This event was just a normal meetup - mostly networking time and a couple of speakers. One of the speakers was my friend, former student, former colleague, and successor as Coordinator of CS at Stuy - JonAlf. JonAlf gave an update on the "state of StuyCS" going back to when I first started to build things. I enjoyed the talk and since, as JonAlf said, even though the audience collectively knew the development, individually very few did. There were also a couple of old timers who probably didn't know any of it.

It made me think of how much education is playing the long game.

Things started in Fall 1994 when I started teaching APCS-AB - the one that was both a college CS1 and CS2 - four sections. Prior to that there had been a single APCS class and a random programming elective here or there but all taught by math teachers and all taught as one offs.

Spring '95 brought graphics and Fall '95, Systems.

At this point, we, or I was just starting but I wouldn't call it a program. Three courses but I'm not sure I'd be able to claim any strong coherence.

APCS was, well, APCS. Nothing special there except that we probably covered more and more deeply than most high school programs.

Graphics was the terminal course - second term senior year. It had a nice combination of the programming they had learned in APCS, Math from precalc and a touch of calc, and a little of their physics. Much like the rug, it tied things together nicely. That, plus the kids made pretty pictures which helped stave off but didn't eliminate senioritis.

Systems was just thrown in. It was based around Intel Assembly programming in our lab of MS-DOS/Windows-95 machines I thought it might be interesting and fun for the kids and I knew I could teach it but there wasn't any deep thought that went into why I created it as opposed to some other course to fill that space.

Around 1998 / 1999 things started to change. First, Systems had changed. We had switched the labs over from the extremely overpriced and obsolete IBM PS/2s (obsolete because IBM had stopped selling them prior to selling them to Stuy) for regular PCs which we could install Linux on. Since we could do much more with the platform I decided to change up the course. I also had a few years of graduates now in college and was able to get their thoughts on what was missing from their CS sequences.

That's how our new Systems class was born. It covered C programming and an assortment of Systems topics. Some was similar to what they'd cover in college but a lot was set up to support them in college. I continued to get feedback from my grads on this and other courses from that point on and it helped direct my approach to course building.

I also created the sophomore one semester intro course that would later become a requirement. This class was designed as a new CS0 - something that would be programming heavy but would both expose students to a wider range of CS topics than a typical intro programming class and also relate CS to other disciplines. In some ways APCS-Principles which came around later had a similar intent but I'd say my course was much more rigorous and much better for my population.

The goal would be to provide something valuable to the majority of students who might never take any more CS while at the same time, inspiring and preparing those who would.

Now I'd say we had a program. It was still basically just me along with a math teacher and then two picking up some of the APCS classes but we had a cohesive sequence of courses that made sense.

Intro would lead into APCS would lead into Systems/Graphics.

Being a StuyCS grad meant something.

A few other selective schools also claimed CS programs at the time but as far as I could tell they had intro programming followed by APCS followed by just teaching the next college course or courses in high school.

I didn't see the point of that. The kids would get algorithms, theory, compilers etc. in college anyway.

For me, Systems and Graphics made much more sense. My Systems was set up to support the college classes and Graphics was typically an elective so it would add to my kid's backgrounds and not just be something they'd take again. Besides, I ended up working some things like parsing and automata into the graphics course.

We also started to grow.

By 2007 we had 3 full time CS teachers plus five sections of CS classes being taught by math teachers. Intro was a single semester requirement. We had 12 intro classes each semester, 5 ACPS classes (still teaching AB), 2 Systems/Graphics (Fall/Spring), plus one research which was really a fake class to let me work with my kids to run the network although I did do my best to support the kids who did want to do legit research and within a few years, the class did morph into a legit research class.

That's a little over 10 years. The long game.

We gad a coherent three year sequence. It wasn't random electives. Being a StuyCS grad meant something. Now, I'm not saying that my way was the only way or the right way for everyone but I think for CS it made a world of sense. Contrast that with Stuy's English department. Through most of your four years, students could select which English "selective" to take and they ranged wildly. You could take Science Fiction, Women's Voices, Children's book authoring, science writing, detective fiction and tons more. This means that Stuy grads can have radically different English and Literature experiences. For English. maybe that's good. For a HS CS program, I think a coherent sequence is better. I guess it's also like having area requirements for a Bachelors of Arts degree - take one from this category, two from this etc. versus Columbia's core curriculum where everyone literally takes the same classes for the core.

I was confident though that it was working. At one point, I saw a tweet by Morgan Missen. I don't know her but was told that she was the top tech team talent builder in the Bay Area. She tweeted "Stuyvesant, the Stanford of the East." I also started hearing from VCs, investors, and founders about how they didn't really like seeing a high school on a graduate's resume unless it was Stuyvesant. If they saw StuyCS, the knew it meant something.

By the time I left Stuy for Hunter College we were mostly stable. Maybe one or two more APCS sections on any given year and I did create a Software Engineering course called Software Development to replace research. That course, like my others, was designed based on what my graduates were saying they needed.

So it took twenty years of work but in this case slow and steady might not have won the race, but it built the program.

Now, I've gone over why I left Stuy in some other posts but two important reasons were my stagnating - I had done everything I felt I could do and also, I felt that some of my team was also being held back as they were too deferential to me.

Regardless, I left, JonAlf took over team leadership and here's where they are today.

They now have an opt in full year CS requirement. Kids can either take a full year of CS or one of CS and one of drafting.

That translates to 13 sections of the full year course and 6 of the single semester. They also rebranded intro and now call it "foundations of CS."

They also have 7 APCS classes and that's probably the limit, at least based on teaching the Stuy version that includes data structures. They tried to have additional sections based on requests but that led to a portion of the students really struggling.

To address that, they created NeXTCS which covered APCS-A but at a more relaxed pace and had a lot of fun projects. I think they were using Processing. They're running 4 sections of that.

On top of that add 2 Systems to go along with 2 of a new Cybersecurity class as well as the usual 2 of softdev and a new Ethics class. The only reason they aren't running 2 graphics classes this year as well is because they had a crunch in math and need to send a CS teacher over to teach a couple of math classes - how times have changed.

To run this, they have 8 full time CS teachers.

There's no doubt in my mind that my leaving was the right move. StuyCS has gone on to new heights under new leadership and I couldn't be prouder of them.

It did take a span of just about 30 years to go from no CS to a three year sequence, a full year required option, a coherent sequence of electives and eight full time CS teachers. Just another indication that education is a marathon not a sprint. Now, we're in the infancy of CS teacher certifications and much of the country isn't even where Stuy was thirty years ago in terms of courses. I expect it'll be another thirty years or probably more before it's all worked out. I guess for old timers like me (and some of my readers and friends) we get to be Moses - we get to see the promised land but we won't get to enter it. It won't be here for another few decades but that's okay, that's just how education progresses. It's gratifying to look back and see how far we've come so far.