Last week Devorah and I attended the Stuyvesant High School Alumni Association's annual fundraising gala. We were there as guests of the Alumni Association since, as retired teachers, gala tickets are generally out of our budget range.

We had a great time. I spent time with a bunch of former students spanning the years, some current teachers I hadn't seen since I left Stuy, as well as new Stuy alums and current students. I had a great conversation with one particular young man, a graduating Stuy senior, who's working on an interesting app. He asked if he could contact me to talk about it. I told him, I'd love to so I hope he reaches out.

At one point, I was talking to a current Stuy teaching involved in their research program - that is, the STEM research program, primarily focused around the Regeneron Science Talent Search - Westinghouse to us old timers. She lamented to me that she wished she could get one of the CS teachers into the fold - to basically run a CS version of the other research classes that already exist for Biology, Chemistry, Physics, and Mathematics. Each of those classes target students in their Junior years, hook them up with a researcher, and shepherd them through the process of ultimately submitting a project to the big competition.

I had to explain that I actually did run a CS "research" course back in the day but it was actually a bogus cover course since I didn't think that high school students, even with Stuyvesant's multi-year program had sufficient CS and Math to by and large do good research.

The class was created primarily because, at the time, I had set up and was running Stuy's network. I got neither pay nor time compensation for this. I also typically worked with a handful of students. They learned a lot about Linux and networking and helped keep things running. They also got nothing for their troubles - no grade, no pay.

The deal was that we'd create the class, they'd learn the networking stuff and we'd all have some time to keep things running. The kids would also get a nice high grade rewarding their work. They also had to cobble together a "research" project that they could enter into Westinghouse/Intel/Siemans/Regeneron.

Over the years, the class had some students who wanted to do the research thing and were not so much there for the networking side. Those kids had to do a more legit research project. Now, occasionally I had a kid who was able to do an excellent project. Spike's Sporknet project which was a design for a scalable, anonymous network. Really good work and ahead of his time. Brad's work on Captcha was also really great. The thing is, though, that most kids just didn't have the background to do solid CS research.

Even though Stuy's program was and is arguably the most rigorous HS CS program in the country, by second term Junior year, they're just finishing up CS1 (APCS-A). They'd be studying data structures during the second half of 11th grade. Since the research projects were always due in the early November, senior year courses don't have much affect.

On the math side, some might be taking calculus during their junior year but many will be in precalc. Few will have taken statistics and none will have taken discrete math or linear algebra.

These kids were and are tremendously talented but they just don't have the knowledge base yet. On top of that, on the programming side, they haven't yet gotten to the point where they can write large complex programs reasonably quickly. That doesn't typically happen until some time senior year, or the semester after data structures.

Now, in the sciences, the kids were always hooked up with a researcher in a lab. In the best case, they can do legit research. At Stuy, in all areas, including CS, there are usually a couple of outlier kids who had exposure early on and come in with a wealth of experience in their resaerch field. In the worse case though, these kids become glorified lab assistants. The thing is, though, this can be a really good experience. They are there for the entire process and learn a lot. In CS, the equivalent is basically having the kids implement an already designed algorithm or create part of a software system that isn't really showing them the research process. From what I saw, it just wasn't as rich of an experience.

After a few years, I dropped the network - too many headaches and soon after, got rid of the "research" course. I think it was the right choice. The research course could have continued and been a good experience for the couple of outlier kids each year who came in super strong but that wouldn't be a sensible use of resources with each class having over 1000 students.

So, unfortunately, I wasn't able to help this Stuy research teachers case for CS research in high school. I did point out that the kids might be able to leverage their CS and coding skills in their research in other areas. I had one student who ultimately did Physics research who made extensive use of his CS skills for data analysis and visualization. I believe he was a semi-finalist. I've also had former students do Astronomy research in college and grad school using CS skills they got at Stuy.

So, I guess that's it. Am I wrong on this? I certainly could be. Maybe I wasn't back then but times have changed. Sure, if a school had unlimited resources for unlimited classes, having a CS research class would be great even if it only had a handful of students. With budget and space constraints though, I think a full class of another advanced elective is more valuable.

All this said, I'd love to hear differing opinions.