So it seems like Copilot and similar will be beneficial to programmers but the question remains as to how beneficial. Will it be incremental change or will it be a game changer?

Today we'll look at how it will affect teaching and learning CS.

It seems pretty clear that one group of learners will benefit from things like copilot - people who are already strong programmers who are learning something new. Like autocomplete on steroids it will free those programmers of having to look everything up all the time. I guess a second group that will benefit will be autodidacts but they'll thrive no matter what and when we're talking about opportunity and equity we've got to focus on everyone else.

For everyone else, particularly those learning in classes using copilot will have certain benefits but the real question isn't "is there an advantage" but rather a costs benefits analysis.

Since copilot can be thought of as autocomplete on steroids we can compare the discord that goes on when discussing IDEs with autocomplete.

Some teachers think autocomplete is great and don't see any downside to students using editors that support it. Others feel that it's important for students to type everything out.

On the one hand, you can have autocomplete for things like system.out.writeln - type writeln and hit tab and you're done. One could argue that if you're ever in an environment without autocomplete you'd be screwed but if you think about it, there's no deeper understanding if you type system.out.writeln vs writeln particularly for beginners where the system.out is boilerplate.

On the other hand typing for and having that complete to a for loop is different than actually typing out the complete loop. One could argue that typing for and then tab is just a higher level of abstraction but I'd argue that it's important to understand what's going on with the loop first. This is where I'm not sure if the autocompletion is the right way to go.

Ideally, I'd love to see students "level up" - after typing out for loops for a bit they can unlock the for loop autocomplete feature - hey - now that's an idea for a student ide!!!

I know that some people also feel that hand writing things is an aide to learning. If that's so, is typing as well? Is writing a for loop by hand then then typing better? Is typing it all out better than just drag and dropping a block? I don't know the answer to any of these but I think they're interesting questions.

The question, or at least one of the questions about using copilot in teaching and learning is the same but copilot takes it to the next level. Instead of typing for tab and getting a for loop you can type // sum the values of an integer array ar - you can use it to complete programming idioms or even complete functions.

Bigger time concepts but the same basic ideas.

There is another question that I think is going to get lost in the shuffle though. Even if we decide that using copilot like technologies is an absolute win, will there be unintended consequences. Will other things be lost.

This has happen time and again.

In CS, when APCS-A/B went from C++ to Java we lost memory management. This was good in certain ways but memory management is an important concept for computer science students to understand. Take it out of CS1 and CS2 and you have to put it back somewhere else. From what the people doing the hiring in tech in the years following 5 years after the switch, it wasn't always put back or put back effectively. This isn't a surprise since every college does things their own way and if a student places out of one or more courses with AP credit, well, they might miss something critical or be less well prepared for it when it does appear.

The other big example I always use is from math. Calculators. No, I'm not going to say that having students work out hard arithmetic by hand was a good and important thing. I'm talking about interpolation.

Prior to calculators, when our students learned about logs or trig functions they had log and trig tables. The tables only had so many entries so students had to find values between the entries and they invariable did have to, they learned and used linear interpolation.

If you think about it, that might have been the most useful real life math skill taught in high school math at the time. Certainly it was up there.

Hello calculators, goodbye trig and log tables. Goodbye learning interpolation. That's a skill that's been lost to students for now almost a quarter of a century. Sure, students can and have been functioning with knowing interpolation but when you look at the math that has and hasn't been taught I'm fairly confident in saying that when we stopped teaching interpolation something was lost.

That's my fear of copilot type technologies.

When we teach mergesort we're not just teaching mergesort. We're teaching the concept of divide and conquer algorithms. We're discussing run time. We're looking at sorting in place or not. We also have a platform to discuss solving problems that make use of different but similar algorithms.

When we solve a dynamic programming problem we're not solving a specific problem but we're teaching a general method of problem solving.

At a smaller scale level, when beginners program they make errors. Now error messages aren't particularly helpful but learning how to read them and fix ones errors is yet another manner of problem solving we're teaching. Some may argue that error messages will get better in the future. Well, I've been programming for decades and while they're a little better than from way back, they've got a way to go. Besides the problem sometimes isnot so much that the error is bad but that students don't take the time to read through the (admittedly overly complex) wall of text. Solving unexpected errors, reading documentation, searching for solutions. These are all things we're teaching beyond just the coding.

Copilot might make for faster coding but how much of our ability to teach that more important problem solving will be lost?

Of course the answer might be none or it might be that the benefits might outweigh the costs but educators should pay close attention not to the superficial but very cool way that copilot replaces a short prompt with a long coded solution but rather to what we're really trying to teach our kids beyond grunt coding and how will copilot affect that.