TL;DR: I’m forming a Community of Practice of AI-critical CS teachers who want to “AI-proof” their students. Please sign up here to be a part of that. Core members will met in early July to design a first community for the week of July 20th.
OK - this is long, because it quotes posts from the College Board forum.
You’ve probably seen the College Board AP CSP Community announcement today, which began:
“Given the rapidly evolving technology landscape and especially the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), the AP Program will redesign the course and exam to meet the moment. Through the redesign, students will have an opportunity to learn about AI concepts and apply them immediately, while still maintaining a focus on the fundamentals of coding.”
I wrote a similar response there to mine above (less strident, as I’ve cooled off a little). Here are responses there from colleagues that indicate the impacts these moves may have on the entire CS Principles effort, since it goes much deeper than CodeAI.org:
*"I find the integration of AI into an introductory-level curriculum extremely inappropriate. We are trying to provide a foundational understanding of a subject to students who haven’t worked in it before. Yes, AI is a tool. Yes, it can help you program. But if YOU don’t know how to program, you have no basis to understand if AI is providing you with reasonable answers.
Making AI use mandatory at this level does not make sense. What happens when they go on to take further courses in the field? AI already knows how to do all of that; will they suddenly stop using it? If not, how will they be ready when they get to a problem that AI can’t easily solve?*
*The press release is describing a totally different course from CS Principles. They should rename it “AP Prompt Engineering” or “AP Vibe Coding”, because it sounds like it will not be “Principled”.
We have been considering changing our offerings in the past couple of years, especially in light of the removal of material from AP CS A. With yesterday’s announcement of the integration of AI into Principles, that may be the end of us offering AP CSP. We’ll just switch to AP CS A as our introductory course and offer others for further enrichment."
And:
"I strongly agree. Most of my students that used AI to support their coding produced code that didn’t meet requirements. Frankly most kids don’t check to see if any assignment they use AI on, regardless of the subject, meets the assignment requirements. You have to be able to read and interpret code to tell if an AI generated program meets requirements.
*I worked as a systems analyst & programmer analyst for 20 years before I started teaching. Too often large companies would gut their IT departments and then hire outside firms to code large projects: Arthur Anderson/ Accenture, Price Waterhouse, etc. Too often the project developers short changed the inquiry section of the project and they wouldn’t accurately capture the clients needs and requirements, data pools for testing the code were drastically limited. The whole testing cycle was woefully inadequate . Consultants tended to throw the code at the clients and book for the door leaving crappy code and no documentation.
This is without AI. AI will compound the issue.*
As teachers we are pushed to rush through topics. Most canned curriculum has too much in it, more tasks than there are days in the school year. And with all of that they short change the code development process. It should be part of every new code structure - I.e. Theory- and when and how should loops be used, are their alternatives. Then design- how is the loop being used, is it effective, is it useful. Then build a test data set and test- does it act as it should, does it meet requirements."
- Elizabeth Dillard
Perhaps I should not have been so hard on CodeAI.org above if they were “merely” adapting to what was happening with the AP CS Principles currlculum. My “beef” may be with the College Board first of all. That said, here’s what I’ve come to decide:
- Following Jason’s comment above, I will follow the original principles behind the CSP course design next year, not take AI as an organizing principle.
- I’ll stick with Code.org’s pre-AI May 2025 curriculum, and end with an AI Unit incorporating standalone AI units (or their successors ) and “The AI Doc”.
- My students will continue to use Github and VS Code (sadly, no more Github Classroom!) to collaborate with professional tools and kanban boards.
- Within our use of Github, I’ll show students what Copilot does, in the context of computational thinking skill development it leapfrogs, and why we don’t use it.
I’m forming a Community of Practice for teachers who want to “AI-proof” their students in similar ways – as critical thinkers who fight for human and planetary values, understanding what AI is and does while developing a complement of skills that LLM chatbots cannot replace.
If you are interested in being part of that community, please sign up here. We’ll have a first convening during the week of July 20th. If you’d like to be a core member and help me design this, say so on the form. I’ll reach out briefly the week of June 15th to set up a design sprint some time the week of July 6th.
Hopefully that’s enough structure to get this started in a timely way without projecting too much of my own thinking onto a mutual aid effort. I’ll step back.
-Bram
