Should we use MongoDB in High School? That's the question. Usually when I give a post such a title, I already have an opinion - it'll be a yes or no and if it's yes, I'll have a plan.

Not this time. My gut tells me there's a place for it but I'm not sure where. Besides, that's not what this post is really about.

At one point during SIGCSE 2023, I stopped by the MongoDB booth. Had a couple of great conversations with the people there. I wasn't looking for how I might use it in my classes - I knew I'd be retiring soon but I did want to convey how much I liked the product and how supportive they've been towards some of my efforts both K12 and while I was at Hunter, I mean I still have more MongoDB shirts than pretty much any other type of swag shirt from when they donated so many for some high school hackathons I've run.

This year, at SIGCSE, I reconnected with my new MongoDB friends from 2023 and we started asking if there were a place for MongoDB in a typical High School. Clearly there was at Stuy but I covered MongoDB there in a senior elective after the kids had already finished a CS0 class as well as a college CS1 and CS2.

Now MongoDB is much more advanced than when I started using it but even back then there was a lot to like. It stored documents essentially in dictionaries which made things much simpler than SQL. You also formed dictionaries to form queries which might have been trickier to "get' than SQL with things like "SELECT NAME from PEOPLE where AGE=30" or something like that but much easier to debug and automate since one deals with a data structure to do it in MongoDB as opposed to string manipulation for old school SQL. It was also helped from the fact that most student projects didn't benefit from the relational SQL model. There was also an open source server you could install and self host. Nowadays MongoDB is much more capable for example it's data lake features.

I don't think MongoDB is the tool to universally use in High School but my gut tells me there's a place for it.

The cool thing to me is that we're now exploring this. Me, a few teachers I've gathered, and some new friends at MongoDB. The interesting thing is how it came about. Many of the K12 company based initiatives were the result of the company (or college) deciding that they wanted to do something in the K12 space. This frequently comes with a certain level of hubris that they can do it better. Not always, but frequently. The small companies and startups then work to generate interest and ultimately market share. The big boys are more frequently anointed since so few K12 CS educators are currently armed to really evaluate what they're seeing.

This was different. Nothing coming from the top. What started as a serindipidous conversation between someone on the education team at Mongo and me, an old education curmudgeon. We both asked "does it make sense?" We didn't know the answer so we're exploring.

Tomorrow morning I'll be going to MongoDB World Local in New York and hope to meet a couple more people on the MongoDB team. In the next few weeks, I'll be talking to some teachers who also hope to explore the MongoDB in high school question. After that, maybe not until the Fall if people are away for the summer, we'll get together and start to get to work.

Either we'll see that MongoDB probably doesn't make sense in high school or we'll figure out where and how. It'll be a fun process and if we do figure it out, you can bet it'll make more sense than any of the typical initiatives that come from above.