I'm enjoying reading about Ria Galanos' new chapter on her blog. In her most recent post Ria briefly talks about the fact that very few professional developers start from scratch and most work in existing large code bases. She wonders why the College Board got rid of the APCS-A case study and talked about how it gave students an opportunity to work on a multi-file complex system. Over the past few years others have wondered if the College Board should bring it back.

While I agree that students should learn to work in a large code base at some point in time and there are a whole bunch of software engineering skills that would better serve the vast majority of CS students than what is taught in full undergraduate programs I have to disagree that bringing back the APCS-A case study is the way to go.

I'm not against case studies and large complex CS projects in APCS-A per se but rather that tying a specific large project to the AP exam forces teachers to teach in a way that might not suit them or their students. The case study never worked for me. It never fit in with the way I liked to develop my classes. As a result it was merely a time sink. To be honest, most of the time I just paid it lip service with minimal coverage. It never seemed to affect my student's scores so it wasn't something I had to worry about. I also used to use a few texts over the years that integrated a large project throughout their chapters and since those also didn't mesh with the class it made large swaths of the books more difficult to work through when trying to use them to understand core concepts.

I haven't looked at all the newly released materials yet but I did like the recent trend of making labs available that you could use to cover core concepts but you didn't have to. The same could be done for case studies. Nothing stops the College Board or independent providers from releasing things like Grid World or other case studies. Make them available for teachers who's classes are structured in ways that those case studies support the class rather than are a forced add on.

Beyond this, we also have the issue with exposing kids to larger sometimes partially opaque code bases. This is pretty important but many students don't learn this until their on the job.

At Hunter, we do have a capstone project course where students do indeed create some large team application using multiple technologies but they do it largely on their own having not formally been prepared in their earlier classes for development in the large. In my experience, huge numbers of students from a wide array of well respected institutions do little better at this. Many students do have to work in a professors framework - write a "player" for the game and such but that's much more limited.

So, we should be doing a better job at this but I'm also not sure if APCS-A is the place. While it might work well at a TJ, where Ria taught or Stuy where I spent most of my career, my gut tells me that this is something for a course later in the undergraduate sequence.

Regardless of when this is covered (if it's covered at all) it's certainly worth teaching kids the common tooling to help them along. Back in the day I used Ctags to navigate large complex C code bases. Ctags still exists in more modern forms and it and similar tools work for a variety of languages. Coding standards like those published by Google can make for an easier code based to understand and tools like Javadoc and similar for other languages can create web based documentation where students can click through complex hierarchies and relationships. Tools like Ripgrep and Silver Searcher can also be lifesavers in finding code across complex directory structures. Most if not all of these tools are directly supported in many editors and ides.

So, where am I at on this. Let's not require any specific case study in APCS-A but let's make things like them available. On the other hand, it would be great if our students did indeed all have the opportunity to learn how to work in large complex pre-existing code bases but that's an issue well beyond just APCS-A and high school.