Ask HN: What should the curriculum be for a Computer Science high school?

Machine code on an 8-bit processor - ideally an old microcomputer, failing that an ATtiny. It's the only sensible way of teaching the fundamentals of how computers actually work. A reasonably bright young teenager can easily understand a computer from the metal up, so long as that computer has a bare-bones instruction set and no more memory than can be copied onto a couple of sheets of paper. There are a number of excellent books written for the Vic-20 or Timex 1000 that cover all the fundamentals in an accessible way.

Is AP Computer Science any good? When I took it, it sucked horribly. That was when it was Pascal-based. The following year they moved to C++, which I heard was an unmitigated disaster. IIRC Allen Downey, a guy known for his great CS textbooks, was so fed up with the clusterfuck that was the AP Computer Science curriculum, that he wrote his own textbook for the intro course the taught and he based it on Python.

Either Scheme or Python should be the basis of an AP CompSci course.

Check out How to Design Programs version 2. The authors of that book have spent more time on the problem of pedagogy in computer science than anyone else I know. They've really thought the whole thing through very well.

Shouldn't web programming come before Python/Java? In the class I'm teaching the students picked up Javascript and HTML/CSS much quicker than Python or Java.

I think the AP Computer Science C++ program (both semesters) was excellent preparation for everything college and the real-world threw at me. They teach it in Java now which I'd support. My high school had an intro programming course before this as well.

People will get into religious wars about what language to to teach by my $.02 is that Java is sufficiently close to C/C++ for low-level prep and close to JavaScript/Ruby for scripting.

A lot of my favorite programs in middle and high school were written in QBASIC.

That's because you could write stuff like

  SCREEN 12: CLS
  PSET (8, 3), 10
  CIRCLE (100, 200), 45
  LINE (15, 15)-(25, 25)

Drawing stuff is really a lot more interesting than boring text manipulations or algorithms -- especially for a beginner of middle/high school age. Programming is fun because you're creating your own world with its own rules -- and that resonates right away with a student when that world is something they can visualize and interact with using realtime graphics, rather than just read about with text output.

Python/Pygame is probably the closest modern equivalent. Especially if you put some of the boilerplate like window creation in a file, and tell them to copy it into their program's directory and import it. (Or, having them run the boilerplate file, and having that file import the student's code, might work better.)

Show minimal drawing stuff right away. Then you can go in a lot of directions. Use a FOR loop to draw a pixel or circle going from left to right across the screen at a speed of one pixel per frame. Then you want it to reverse direction at the right edge, so you can show IF statements. Show how you can simplify the code by using negative numbers, this will introduce the concept of having velocity. Having a circle reverse direction is a little trickier than a pixel, because you have to take into account its radius.

Then make your objects go at 45 degrees to the coordinate axes -- more on the velocity concept without being too difficult/technical. Or have an arbitrary number of them -- now you have arrays. Or teach them how to replace circles with an image downloaded from the Web. Then put a background on it. Then introduce user input into the equation. Maybe you can click the mouse to spawn a new particle or move the particle to the mouse location. What happens if it's a circle, you did the radius fix, and the user moves it closer to the edge than it would naturally get? Then think about gravity: Just have the velocity increase a little in the "down" direction every frame. Of course, if you're imagining the bottom of the screen as a wall, then you have to figure out how to stop it when it tries to fall past the bottom of the screen.

A little more work, and you have a simple platform game. You just have to come up with an input scheme, figure out how to do vertical walls, and how to make the "bottom" be different heights depending on the x coordinate. Then have enemies that can "collide" with the player.

For a class project, every student (or small group) picks a different feature to add to the engine -- moving enemies, scrolling, healthbar, dangerous terrain, levels defined by files, levels generated randomly, enemies that shoot, players that shoot, (you could have them "toss baseballs" or "cast spells" if "shooting" is too violent), an animated player sprite (a great idea if there's an artistically talented student in the class, though even the most lacking artists could still complete the assignment with a quick visit to opengameart.org), or student ideas (must be approved by teacher). The teacher picks a couple features of his own to implement. Then everyone gives their patches to the teacher (for grading). After the patched versions are submitted, the teacher publishes them as diff -u style patches to the entire class, and everyone now has to add as many features as possible. This teaches the students a little bit about how collaborative development works in practice.

Having a high school devoted to CS lets you do a really good job with this concept, because you can devote an entire course to it. This should be their first CS course. Its primary purpose is inspiring them, motivating them, getting them excited for the possibilities of what they're learning. It will also:

Introduce students to different program constructs.

Introduce some physics/mathematics theory for the particular problem domain.

Introduce students to the way ma...

Browser automation, leading to web crawling

OK, I was going to write a huge post but I'm short on time so I'll just list what I made good use of after HS (my experience wasn't in the US btw). Boolean logic and boolean algebra and database design practices and SQL hands-on all have come handy multiple times. Programming was taught badly but after getting a hint of it, I managed to learn it my myself. Data structures and algorithms (usual stuff that you do in college but we only did up to binary trees, O(n) and without the math behind of it) again taught badly but I complimented school with independent research. OSI layers and other networking stuff. To this I would add some introspection in the popular protocols like TCP/IP, HTTP and SSL. We also had a computer architecture session that came in handy in compilers class later in Uni. And finally we had one of those project workflow sections with UML, waterfall and whatnot. Totally outdated. Should have been thrashed. I would replace it with hand-on deployment and development software hand-ons like Linux/BSD, basic shell, setting up OpenSSH, IP Tables, Nginx, vim/emacs, git...etc