What Should APCS A Really Be About?

Perhaps my favorite panel of SIGCSE 2022 was debating the question of should the APCS A course switch its language from Java to Python? During the discussion it occurred to me that there was a bigger question that had to be answered first That is “what is the purpose of APCS A?” Now the normal and obvious answer is that it should be equivalent to university CS1 courses – the first course CS majors take in university. That's too easy and also not helpful.

What should CS1 be all about? Traditionally, CS 1 was a course taken by CS majors and was preparation for the rest of the CS curriculum. Today it is not that simple. Increasingly, other departments in other disciplines are wanting their students to take CS1 or something much like it. Engineering, astronomy, physics, and business are just some of the areas where programming is growing as a tool. The CS department is the best department to teach this first course.

What does that mean? Well, for one thing it opens the door to more programming languages. While Java and C++ are the big languages for a next course for CS majors the same is not true for other departments. Without getting into the language discussion (until my next post) we need to look at what concepts are needed and ask if they are similar enough for everyone.

Owen Astrachan suggested at SIGCSE that the “A” in “APCSA” has traditionally stood for “Algorithm” but should now stand for “API.” Not that we ignore algorithms of course but that APIs were the way computing was increasingly being done. If we look at how non-CS programs are using programming we see that this is very much the case. This probably means that for CS to remain and improve as a teaching, learning, research tool it has to focus on APIs as well.

That is probably only one example of things we should look at changing (in APCSA and CS1) I  get the impression that many university departments are already changing and looking at changes as they see their CS1 course serving more than just CS majors.

Circling back to APCSA in particular, are all of our APCSA students going to major (or minor) in CS? Probably not. Many? Perhaps. But a majority are probably going to move into other areas of study. To we ignore their needs to focus only on future CS majors? That seems a recipe for turning students off from computing completely. High school courses should never be weed out course. One can have a rigorous impactful course without scaring people away from the field.

There is a lot of thinking about what CS1/APSCA should be about and I want to learn more about how university departments are adjusting to today’s  needs for students. Keeping things the way they are today just because we have always done it that way seems a lot less than ideal.

What is your thinking? What should CS1/APCSA be focusing on?