As a high school teacher, I was never able to attend SIGCSE, the conference of the ACM's Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education. Between the number of instructional days I would lose and the cost, I could never justify going. Instead I looked over the proceedings and read many of the papers. Now that I'm at Hunter, I was finally able to attend. This year in Seattle, the conference ran from Wednesday through Saturday.

What essential topics should we teach in our intro courses? This seems to be a recurring topic recently. It can be an important topic but, unfortunately, too often, it seems that people have too myopic a view I remember thinking about this years ago when APCS moved from C++ to Java. Both languages have good and bad points both for practical and educational use. A big loss in the move to Java was memory management and the topics you could cover when memory issues arose.