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New York City gets a Software Engineering High School

329 points by apress 15y ago

jamesmanning 15y ago
Will they record/share the videos/lectures/notes? It seems like it could also be a boon to many others if they can take the efforts of this school and share them out, similar to OCW at MIT, or Stanford, or even Khan Academy. I think it would be particularly interesting because the other material out there tends to target either too high (the university material is at a university level, of course) or it doesn't have the same kind of feedback as what the students will be able to give here. While Joel doesn't want it to just be superstars, it seems fairly likely that a good number of the kids would be the kind that already wrote their first OS and compiler before they attend, so I'm wondering if there will be a similar 'level divide' as what's seen in industry, and if so, what that ends up doing to the ones below that Mendoza line...
grifaton 15y ago
Could anything like this ever happen in the UK?
- scopendo 15y ago
  Maybe in York...
- mjwalshe 15y ago
  Probaly not they wouldnt get 5 good GSCES which have to include english so school would be put in special needs and the head and 80% of the staff woudl be fired. And a "technical" school getting anyone into oxbridge mm that will be the day.
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  - Joshim5 15y ago
    You wouldn't think it's a "technical" school from being there, but check out my high school, Bergen County Academies. It's actually part of the technical school district, yet we have the highest SAT score average for a public school in the country, we have 3 electron microscopes, and I conduct original research in our stem cell lab. tl;dr We're part of the technical school district, yet we are one of the schools with the highest Ivy acceptance rates.
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  - tomjen3 15y ago
    Does Oxbridge really matter, anymore? I mean for those of us who aren't planing on becoming the next PM. Similarly I am sure Eton (which seems to be one of the most popular ways into Oxbridge) provides a very good education, but I am also certain that it is almost impossible to pay that much for most people.
    - mjwalshe 15y ago
      Its does for a lot of jobs I am afraid and places like Google do seem to like elite universities. Also Ox-bridge along with Bath, Imperial and Queens (British telecoms Belfast engineering Center used to get the pick of those) do have a rep as being the best universities for CS. Eatons where the thickos go :-) Years ago when Mum had had a stiff Gin she commented if we had stayed in Birmingham she would have tried to get my grandfather to pull strings to get me into King Edwards (Tolkien's Old school) which along with The Oratory (Tony Blairs school) are considered the top 2 schools.
blueprint 15y ago
Mike Zamansky was my AP CS teacher in high school. Way to go Mr. Zamansky! Edit: If anyone has any questions about him or his teaching style I might be able to answer.
- danjvowelsn 15y ago
  I have a question: how does he always come up with such brilliant ideas for Halloween costumes?
  - blueprint 15y ago
    This is just a guess but he's been teaching for long enough that each year he probably keeps an eye out for concepts that he can use during Halloween and then works on the ones he judges to be the best. Some say brilliance is often a product of hard work over a long time.
    - zamansky 15y ago
      actually, I generally procrastinate until early October and than something hits me.
      - danjvowelsn 15y ago
        Hey, it's Mr. Z! You know, all of the tools that I use every day (i.e., Python and Emacs) I first learned from one of your classes. If it weren't for you, I would never be where I am today. Thanks for being an awesome teacher, and congrats on this new project!
        borski 15y ago
        I have to echo this. I learned emacs, python, scheme (and then elisp, and then lisp), linux system administration, and assembly all as direct results of either Z's classes or being on the ZTeam and being pushed to learn more. Most of what I do now on a daily basis stretches directly back to those days. So thanks, Z. :)
humanfromearth 15y ago
At my high-school in Romania we silently eliminated religion (yeah, surprised?), philosophy, 1 lesson of geography, 1 lesson of french and maybe something else.. and at the end we got 2 cs theory lessons and 6 full lessons of coding in the lab per week. We all had a linux shell on the school's server and most used vim to code C with gcc and makefiles. That had a lot to do with what kind of programmer I am today even if I was one of the worst students in the class.
- rgrieselhuber 15y ago
  Religion class aside, it seems a loss to do away with geography, philosophy and foreign languages. I love that you guys had a shell and learned so many great tools, but I think programming is also enhanced by being exposed to many non-CS topics.
  - pbz 15y ago
    Don't worry, they drill more geography in you before high school than they do here throughout high school. Teaching foreign languages starts from kindergarten. By high school if you're inclined and had good teachers you should know enough to have an ok conversation in at least two different languages. Plus you get exposed to so much to English / Spanish (you hear the original soundtrack for every movie for example) that you could learn a lot just from listening. I'm not sure about philosophy though, that would be a loss.(salutari)
  - yummyfajitas 15y ago
    Compare unemployment rates in geography, philosophy and foreign languages. We need more CS people. We don't need more philosophers. (Though admittedly, knowledge of English or German might be very useful if you are coming from Romania.)
    - rgrieselhuber 15y ago
      > We don't need more philosophers. Agreed but imagine how boring CS would be if people were ignorant of all of those other subjects.
JonWood 15y ago
I'm not convinced by the idea of heavily specialised high schools. At that age you should be discovering what you're passionate about, and sampling a wide range of subjects. The focus here seems to be more on training kids up for a job - would anyone be so enthusiastic if we replaced "software engineering" with "assembly line work" or "street sweeping"?
- digitallimit0 15y ago
  The thing is, those aren't fair comparisons. Software engineers are in exceedingly high demand at this stage. This is just a reaction to that demand. In addition, software engineering is a very flexible field. You can engineer under or tangentially to almost any position or field and be a part of what makes those things interesting. Assembly line worker and street sweeper are not so similarly blessed.
  - randomdata 15y ago
    > Software engineers are in exceedingly high demand at this stage. When I was in high school, teachers were in exceedingly high demand. Because of this, teaching was a career highlighted often by our teachers. The result is that most of my friends ended up choose teaching careers; along with a significant number of others in my age group. I have watched my friends really struggle to find work in the field and a couple have even chosen to leave the field altogether because there are far more people than jobs now. Anyway, the point is that being forcefully reactive to the problem of career demands is never a good idea. You will just end up with a bunch of highly trained people who are unable to use those skills. I do not believe that software development is immune to this fact: Both teaching and programming are skills that are useful everywhere, but it still didn't help my friends. The market will naturally sort itself out. As pay for programers rises, more people will become interested in the field until the pay declines again. The influx becomes manageable this way. Any additional incentives will cause the problems above. It is best to not mess with the market.
  - nik_0_0 15y ago
    True, they aren't exactly fair comparisons, but I find them relevant. I recall just a few days ago, there was a discussion how "everyone" should be able to program, and a lot of the value comes from applying that programming to another, personally interesting field. I remember a quote "in 10 years not being able to program will be like not being able to...". No matter what that last word is, I agree with the above statements, a school so focused on one thing needs to give the students a chance to probe their other interests, ones they can use their software engineering prowess to excel at. I think this is a great idea, but hope that in 10 years the kids who only have experience in software engineering do not become a commodity.
jrockway 15y ago
I'm not sure it's a great idea to get so focused at such an early age. There's a lot to learn about the world when you're 14, and it might be good to explore a wide range of topics. (I personally took most of my "real" classes in high school, so by the time I got to college, I had an idea of what I wanted to do. After going to college for a year, I realized my needs would not be met in that way. But deciding at 20 is a lot different from deciding at 14.)
- mjwalshe 15y ago
  Yes you do need to have a wider range than just CS In fact a lot of what industy needs is more Computer Enginering and lees hyper secpecialised CS majors - you dont see Audi or Mercedes saying we need engineers lets train a load of physicists.
  - beatle 15y ago
    Role reversal: Employers say they can't find workers http://lifeinc.today.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/01/13/10142795-role-reversal-employers-say-they-cant-find-workers http://lifeinc.today.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/01/13/10142795...
  - tghw 15y ago
    Computer Engineering is generally hardware and firmware design, something that is becoming less and less important as generalized processors have become smaller, cheaper, and more powerful. At this point, almost everything can be done in software, so a Computer Science degree is more important. Also, your Audi/Mercedes analogy is flawed. Physicists and engineers are very different, and if they needed more engineers, they would sponsor engineering schools. Right now we need more software developers, so training kids in Computer Science makes complete sense. Some schools (including my alma mater) do provide a separate Software Engineering degree, but they generally overlap so much with CS as to be virtually indistinguishable. It's also somewhat laughable to call Software Engineering "engineering", as there is a general lack of rigor and no formal qualification for software engineers like there is for every other branch of engineering.
johnrob 15y ago
I am certain that if this thing actually happens, it will spin out companies on par with any accelerator.
jilebedev 15y ago
As a person who finds immeasurable delight in programming, I am immediately wary of this idea. My impression is that this HS's curriculum would be narrower than usual, to accommodate a deep focus on SEG. If that is the case, I feel this is a disservice to young humans: we ought to be exposing them to as broad a range of human thought as possible, and not narrowly focusing on a passion. The idea (as I understand it) seems to be a recipe for producing narrow humans.
- blueprint 15y ago
  If they learn to engineer software, surely they'll know how to access Wikipedia.
  - jilebedev 15y ago
    Education not only teaches facts, but efficiently exposes a person to unknown unknowns. I'd argue that a student-teacher conversation is more efficient at exposing a student to an unknown unknown, than Wikipedia would be.
    - blueprint 15y ago
      Could you share one or two unknown unknowns to which you were exposed in school?
  - LargeWu 15y ago
    Learning how to accumulate facts is a completely different problem than learning how to think about ideas. I think teaching children how to think about things is far more important than focusing on specific skills at that age, even if they are useful skills.
    - blueprint 15y ago
      How can one confirm the benefit that thinking has had in one's life? From my point of view, it's more important to know both the principle and the problems (questions) that determine the results that exist in the world, rather than learning how to think about how to solve problems. It's my experience that I have to think when there's an important fact that I haven't realized.
toblender 15y ago
This is fantastic! This is the same thing I want to start in China someday.
vigilanteweb 15y ago
I think this is great. The kids who are going to be applying and accepted to this school already have the desire to pursue CS and I would imagine are already investigatingthe topic on their own time. To be able to be exposed to formalized education in a field that you're already excited about is an amazing opportunity.
systemizer 15y ago
I love computers and I work with them everyday, but I believe the idea of a high school geared primarily towards software engineering is wrong. Computer Science teaches you to think logically about problems. It gives you primitives to build complex systems that will later help you understand the world. In fact, most computer scientists think the same when they approach a problem. But there are other kinds of thinking that are also important which high schools should introduce to students. Art. Music. Athletics. Each subject requires you to think in a different way. I will always remember what Marvin Minsky told me when I was taking his class: when he approaches a problem, he first chooses how he will think, not how he will approach the problem itself. He also said that he studied how the great minds of the past approached problems so that he could think like them. Do I want to think like a Richard Feynman or an Albert Einstein? Have you ever thought about that question and what it means? If not, I recommend you start reading books that they've written so you can try to capture that brilliance.
- tikhonj 15y ago
  That's a false dichotomy--a school focusing on CS does not preclude covering other subjects well. I doubt anybody wants to do away with art or music or English--rather, they want to take the existing curriculum and add CS, more than they've been able at normal schools. Both my father and my uncle went to a mathematically oriented school in Russia; however, this does not mean their education suffered. What it meant was that on top of doing normal school, they had more math taught at a faster pace. Specializing in high school does not stop you from getting a well rounded education, but it can provide focus and ensures an exceptionally thorough grounding in whatever subject you're specializing in.
seer 15y ago
I am actually astonished that this is the first time something like this is tried in the US. And I also don't understand the negative comments here in HN - most of you guys probably had a passion for computers at even earlier age and would have enjoyed this kind of school greatly. Here In the Sofia (the capital of Bulgaria) this is long established practice - we have loosely specialized schools and students decide where hey want to learn at about 13 years of age. You can of course switch schools as you like, but more prestigious ones have some requirements. The point is that I did know I wanted to work with computers and made this decision then to go to he programming school here and I consider this one of he best decisions in my life. Most of my classmates have ended up with quite accomplished careers in IT but a surprising number end up with very different professions - doctors, dentists, musicians - the emphasis on programming did not hinder their progress that much maybe even helped hem.
- tokenadult 15y ago
  I am actually astonished that this is the first time something like this is tried in the US. And I also don't understand the negative comments here in HN Specialized high schools are moderately common in the United States, some organized as general public schools, and some organized as "charter" schools (a form of regulation in the United States with public funding, but less public funding than most schools, and some variation in regulations that apply to general public schools). In my part of the United States, Minnesota, there is public school open enrollment (any student can enroll in any public school district, anywhere in the state) and quite a few charter schools (Minnesota was the first state to have any charter schools). My public school district receives students from forty-one public school districts, the farthest one more than 100 miles away. (I've heard that the child stays with relatives during the school week and goes back to his parents' home on weekends. That is perfectly legal here in Minnesota.) There is another charter school, far across the metropolitan area from where I live, that purports to be a Math and Science Academy. http://www.mnmsa.org/ http://www.mnmsa.org/ But as I think any European or east Asian reader of the school's website will soon recognize, the Math and Science Academy charter school in Minnesota does not have a credible academic program in mathematics or science up to international standards. (One of my good friends had a child in that school, and she is bitterly disappointed by how much the school killed her daughter's interest in mathematics and science with its underchallenging curriculum.) A regular public school in Minnesota is permitted to have an internal program that is academically selective, for example a "school within a school" for gifted students, as my local school district does http://www.minnetonka.k12.mn.us/ACADEMICS/NAVIGATORPROGRAM/Pages/default.aspx http://www.minnetonka.k12.mn.us/ACADEMICS/NAVIGATORPROGRAM/P... and as other Minnesota public school districts had first. http://www.invergrove.k12.mn.us/atheneum.html http://www.invergrove.k12.mn.us/atheneum.html http://www.springlakeparkschools.org/schools/la/la_lighthouse.asp http://www.springlakeparkschools.org/schools/la/la_lighthous... http://department.services.bloomington.k12.mn.us/modules/cms/pages.phtml?pageid=201931&sessionid= http://department.services.bloomington.k12.mn.us/modules/cms... By contrast, charter schools in Minnesota cannot be academically selective in any way, but must accept all applicants (which is also the plan for the New York City school in the submitted article), allocating spaces by lottery if the number of applicants exceeds the number of spaces. That is one of several ways in which regulations on charter schools are more restrictive than the regulations on regular public school districts. Minnesota has a specialized program for mathematics only http://www.mathcep.umn.edu/umtymp/ http://www.mathcep.umn.edu/umtymp/ that draws in students from all over the Twin Cities metropolitan area for classes at the University of Minnesota. I like that program a lot. My oldest son is an alumnus, and I will have two other children take that program's qualifying test in a few months, for two different entry points into that program. In general, the cultural attitude in the United States is highly hostile to advanced programs for bright learners, as you can see in some of the comments here. Many programs for "gifted" students may not even have added value for academic growth, http://educationnext.org/poor-results-for-high-achievers/ http://educationnext.org/poor-results-for-high-achievers/ academic achievement even in wealthy school districts is often below the standards achieved in poorer countries, http://globalreportcard.org/ http://globalreportcard.org/ and the United States especially lags behind in teaching mathematics to its most advanced students. http://www.hks.harvard.edu/pepg/PDF/Papers/PEPG10-19_HanushekPetersonWoessmann.pdf http://www.hks.harvard.edu/pepg/PDF/Papers/PEPG10-19_Hanushe... So I'm glad to see the New York City experiment in offering a software engineering high school, and will be curious to see if that example is imitated in other parts of the United States.
postfuturist 15y ago
I'm so jealous of people who had the opportunity to take CS classes in high school (none at mine). I've seriously considered volunteering to teach intro CS classes at local high schools, just to pay it forward, I guess. I'd done some BASIC and C programming by the time I entered high school, and I would have taken any programming or CS classes in a heartbeat.
smithhallam 15y ago
Almost makes me wish I was born in america. I can't think of anything like this over here in England.
- mattm 15y ago
  Not for programming per say but a different way of eduction - http://www.summerhillschool.co.uk/ http://www.summerhillschool.co.uk/
bri3d 15y ago
This is awesome, and I would have loved to go to a school like this. However, I wonder if the school will become a place for people who are passionate about software to expand their coding talent at an early age, or if it'll become a place for kids whose parents want them to make money later in life to slog their way through a curriculum. It seems like there's a mixture of both types even in college CS programs, and one kind is a lot more pleasurable to learn with (as well as a lot more useful) than the other.
tomjen3 15y ago
Hmm, won't that be a problem for the students given that the ratio of males to females is going to be far from 1:1?
YuriNiyazov 15y ago
I went to Stuyvesant HS 10 years ago, and I took all the CS classes that the school had offered from Mr. Zamansky ("Z", as we affectionately call him), and can add some more specific information as to why this was necessary. Stuyvesant opened in the beginning of the 20th century, and there are some vestigial components that should've been amputated long ago: in addition to the standard math, science, language (English and foreign), gym requirements, it has some requirements that truly made it historically a technical vocational school. To wit: 1 year of technical drafting (1 semester of drawing mechanical designs on paper, 1 semester of CAD), and 1.5 years of technical shop (1 semester of single-period shop, and 1 semester of double-period shop). By technical shop I mean the following: you get to choose two of ceramics, woodworking, metalworking (aka jewelry-making), electronics (aka computer tech), photography and video editing. It's worth repeating: taking drafting and shop is required to graduate. By and large, these classes are not popular with students at all, the most obvious reason being "why the hell do we need to know this outdated shit? If someone likes it, they can take it as an elective." Over the years, Z developed an ass-kicking CS curriculum: Intro to CS, AP CS (1 year), Systems/Network Programming, Graphics, and Independent Research. They are extraordinarily popular with the students, partially because Z is a great teacher, and partially because of the support of the previous alumni who would regularly take junior and senior-level college classes in their freshman college year thanks to that curriculum. It's worth pointing out that none of the CS classes qualify for any graduation requirement. If you take them, you are taking them on your own time because you are interested. Aside from the knowledge itself, there's no carrot, even though the rest of the world is pointedly indicating that we need more software engineers and less metalworkers. Now, Z goes to the current school administration and says "hey, can we add CS as an option to fulfill some graduation requirements?" and for 10 years straight (not kidding) the response he was getting was a consistent "GFY". Welcome to the NYC public school bureaucracy and people defending their own turf. It's not even that he asked anything outrageous. He didn't say "Hey, can we get rid of drafting and shop?". He said "Can we give our students more choice as to what is required to graduate?" So, about two years ago Z decided to try a different avenue - working within the structure of Stuyvesant was not feasible, so he might as well go outside of it. Someone I know connected him to Fred Wilson, they chatted, and the rest is what you see in front of you. None of this would've happened if the Stuy HS administration had a few less heads up their asses.
ambertch 15y ago
About time! I would actually accept a much lower wage than in industry (as long as I could live off it - which I doubt would be very low in NYC haha) to teach at such a school
feralchimp 15y ago
One of my dreams upon someday achieving FU money is to found a school like this in my home town (Rochester, NY). They need it.
mikecaron 15y ago
If my girls show any interest in CS, I'm moving the family to NYC. Done.
molmalo 15y ago
I don't know if that's novel in the US, but this is pretty common here in Argentina. Secondary school here takes 5 years. Where I did it (1997-2001), before starting the 3rd year (14 years old), we had to choose the speciality (software engeneering, chemistry, civil engeneering, media and communications, musical production, business administration, electronic engeneering, graphic design). I choose software (while most of my friends of that time choose electrinics engeneering). The next three years we had lots of subjects related to CS. This is what I learned there: - Computer architecture, - Networking (osi model, ip stack, that sort of things), algorithms, - Structural programming (1st year), then oop (2nd year) (with C and C++), then Events Driven Programming with VB6 (3rd year) - systems analysis and design, database design (er model) - internet programming (back then, that was ASP, CSS and Javascript) And all along the final year, we had a subject called Final Project, where we had to develop (from the requeriments to the implementantion) a REAL system (mostly done for family companies or NGO's ). When I finished high school I was really prepared to start working, so I did, while at the same time, started going to the university. I can tell that it was REALLY easy to do my grad career because of my background. Even when at University some topics where seen in much deeper detail, i did it much faster than other people, because I already had my mind used to that things, and I just needed to learn the details. But then again, even when I keept studing CS, some of my high school classmates chose other things to study (e.g: medicine, law school, economics, etc). But I think anyway that I must have to be a good experience for them, at least to learn that CS was not for them, and dont lose their time later. Hope it helps!
- molmalo 15y ago
  I need to add that it was a private school (sadly, public school here is going down the tubes). And that CS subjects were additional to the standard subjects (maths, literature, geography, history, foreign language, philosofy, sports, etc).
snikolov 15y ago
There is a lot of worry in this thread about the curriculum being too narrow. While I do not know how it will work in this new school, let me offer some perspective as a Stuyvesant alum. Like many have said, it can be possible to have a "normal" school with all the usual subjects in addition to a prominent computer science program. Take my experience, for example: Freshman year I learned things like recursion, Scheme, dynamic programming, and cellular automata. Sophomore year, I learned basic data structures and algorithms and wrote a couple of games. Junior year I learned systems programming in C, signals, processes, network communication and wrote a filesharing system. The next semester I wrote a computer graphics engine from scratch --- all the way from line drawing to complex lighting and implementing an animation and scene graph language. I also took the independent research class where I worked on information retrieval research. I am not bragging. This is typical (in fact, many of the projects, or variations thereof, are things that everybody in those classes does). And yet, I still took tons of math, physics, chemistry, european history, american history, classical literature, modern literature, tech shop, architecture, and many other things. This was also typical! Other kids took the same common stuff but instead of so much computer science and math they took special electives in philosophy, literature, history, economics, and so on. You really can fit all that stuff in. Stuyvesant is a great example that you can have a serious, multi-year computer science program and still have more than enough focus on other subjects.
dr_ 15y ago
This is interesting, but I'm not certain there need be an institution with just a heavy interest on software engineering. The article suggests that there are those who may not be proficient at other academic pursuits, but may have a keen interest in software engineering. To be honest, most of those kids are the types who will start coding/hacking on their own, not sure if a special school is needed for this. Plus there are added benefits to learning english, the arts, maybe a foreign language - I feel all of these have an impact on the type of person you become, perhaps even the type of software engineer you become. Just like it is with medical school - in many countries you go to medical school straight from high school, but here you complete 4 years of college first. In those four years you learn certain things which med school won't cover and which you may never be able to learn at any point again - but they could have a significant impact on the type of doctor you become, esp in how you interact with your patients. I feel the same applies to any career choice, including software engineering.
- snikolov 15y ago
  To be honest, most of those kids are the types who will start coding/hacking on their own, not sure if a special school is needed for this I might be a special case but for what it's worth: I didn't start programming until I was a freshman at Stuyvesant High School. I took the intro course on a whim and was hooked. If the computer science program didn't exist, I might not have gotten into it. I was more into art than math/cs back then. I didn't have much of an environment to discover that I loved programming before that, and I bet many other kids don't either.
mkramlich 15y ago
from the article: "Starting salaries for smart programmers from top schools are flirting with the $100,000 mark. " By that logic, we better start churning out more doctors, lawyers and CEOs because, gosh, the salaries for those folks are flirting way way past the $100k mark. And we can't have that! "One of the reasons the elite US colleges seem to turn out so few computer science majors every year is that they are only drawing from a narrow pool of mostly white and asian males." Ooooh... we definitely can't have that! There's also a startingly low percentage of redheads and part-time harpists. Let's fix this, stat.
zwilliamson 15y ago
It is too bad our country doesn't care about education. All I hear about on the morning news in California is Jerry Brown making cuts to public spending on education. My wife and I put a lot of time into tutoring our daughter (1st grade) and it would be nice to know that by the time she reached the secondary education level that an option like a Software Engineering focus was available to her. I will try to stay positive and vote for government officials who support creative and proactive educational systems like this.
borski 15y ago
As a Stuyvesant alum and a supporter of Z (a.k.a. Mike Zamansky), I can't wait to see what Z does here. While Stuy was immensely fulfilling and I learned a lot, it was not thanks to the general history and drafting classes. While those were (sometimes) interesting, it was the fact that I was no longer bored as I was in JHS and got to take subjects that allowed to me excel and "stretch my brain," for lack of a better term. Those were limited to my CS classes (Z's classes), the math classes, and psychology. The CS courses I took at Stuy were on par with, and occasionally better than, some of the courses I took at MIT. At the very least, it prepared me to do very well at MIT and allowed me to take more advanced courses. If it hadn't been for Z, I know for a fact I would have been significantly more bored in HS and probably wouldn't have done as well. Being a part of the 'Z-Team,' as we affectionally called the network team at Stuy (yes, we were lucky enough to have a network team; sadly, due to the roadblocks placed in front of Z, I'm not even sure this exists anymore) was easily the best experience of my academic career up until that point, and one I still fondly look back upon. I truly can't wait to see what Z does with a bit of freedom to build what he's been trying to build for over 10 years.
mathattack 15y ago
My 2 cents on the "too specialized" arguments... 1 - In high school, the people who take multiple CS subjects tend to be intellectually curious, and good at many other things. The same folks who took AP CS with me also took AP European history. I suspect it will be similar here. 2 - Similar to what folks say about Stuyvesant, I don't think there will be a crowding out effect of other subjects. 3 - If done right, the teachers can connect many other subjects to computer science: Philosophy, Mathematics, the Scientific Method... This can make those topics more interesting, not less. 4 - The rigor of learning to program is applicable in many other fields. Computer Science grads frequently go into other fields precisely because of this. This diminishes the "Let's fix the software engineering deficit" argument, but it's true that CS as a major signals ability above and beyond programming. If I had grown up in NYC, I would have done anything to go to this school. I am glad that my children might have the opportunity to go to a place like this if they so desire.

329 points by apress 15y ago

Will they record/share the videos/lectures/notes? It seems like it could also be a boon to many others if they can take the efforts of this school and share them out, similar to OCW at MIT, or Stanford, or even Khan Academy. I think it would be particularly interesting because the other material out there tends to target either too high (the university material is at a university level, of course) or it doesn't have the same kind of feedback as what the students will be able to give here. While Joel doesn't want it to just be superstars, it seems fairly likely that a good number of the kids would be the kind that already wrote their first OS and compiler before they attend, so I'm wondering if there will be a similar 'level divide' as what's seen in industry, and if so, what that ends up doing to the ones below that Mendoza line...

grifaton 15y ago

Could anything like this ever happen in the UK?

scopendo 15y ago
Maybe in York...
mjwalshe 15y ago
Probaly not they wouldnt get 5 good GSCES which have to include english so school would be put in special needs and the head and 80% of the staff woudl be fired. And a "technical" school getting anyone into oxbridge mm that will be the day.
- deleted 15y ago
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- Joshim5 15y ago
  You wouldn't think it's a "technical" school from being there, but check out my high school, Bergen County Academies. It's actually part of the technical school district, yet we have the highest SAT score average for a public school in the country, we have 3 electron microscopes, and I conduct original research in our stem cell lab. tl;dr We're part of the technical school district, yet we are one of the schools with the highest Ivy acceptance rates.
- deleted 15y ago
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- tomjen3 15y ago
  Does Oxbridge really matter, anymore? I mean for those of us who aren't planing on becoming the next PM. Similarly I am sure Eton (which seems to be one of the most popular ways into Oxbridge) provides a very good education, but I am also certain that it is almost impossible to pay that much for most people.
  - mjwalshe 15y ago
    Its does for a lot of jobs I am afraid and places like Google do seem to like elite universities. Also Ox-bridge along with Bath, Imperial and Queens (British telecoms Belfast engineering Center used to get the pick of those) do have a rep as being the best universities for CS. Eatons where the thickos go :-) Years ago when Mum had had a stiff Gin she commented if we had stayed in Birmingham she would have tried to get my grandfather to pull strings to get me into King Edwards (Tolkien's Old school) which along with The Oratory (Tony Blairs school) are considered the top 2 schools.

blueprint 15y ago

Mike Zamansky was my AP CS teacher in high school. Way to go Mr. Zamansky! Edit: If anyone has any questions about him or his teaching style I might be able to answer.

danjvowelsn 15y ago
I have a question: how does he always come up with such brilliant ideas for Halloween costumes?
- blueprint 15y ago
  This is just a guess but he's been teaching for long enough that each year he probably keeps an eye out for concepts that he can use during Halloween and then works on the ones he judges to be the best. Some say brilliance is often a product of hard work over a long time.
  - zamansky 15y ago
    actually, I generally procrastinate until early October and than something hits me.
    - danjvowelsn 15y ago
      Hey, it's Mr. Z! You know, all of the tools that I use every day (i.e., Python and Emacs) I first learned from one of your classes. If it weren't for you, I would never be where I am today. Thanks for being an awesome teacher, and congrats on this new project!
      - borski 15y ago
        I have to echo this. I learned emacs, python, scheme (and then elisp, and then lisp), linux system administration, and assembly all as direct results of either Z's classes or being on the ZTeam and being pushed to learn more. Most of what I do now on a daily basis stretches directly back to those days. So thanks, Z. :)

humanfromearth 15y ago

At my high-school in Romania we silently eliminated religion (yeah, surprised?), philosophy, 1 lesson of geography, 1 lesson of french and maybe something else.. and at the end we got 2 cs theory lessons and 6 full lessons of coding in the lab per week. We all had a linux shell on the school's server and most used vim to code C with gcc and makefiles. That had a lot to do with what kind of programmer I am today even if I was one of the worst students in the class.

rgrieselhuber 15y ago
Religion class aside, it seems a loss to do away with geography, philosophy and foreign languages. I love that you guys had a shell and learned so many great tools, but I think programming is also enhanced by being exposed to many non-CS topics.
- pbz 15y ago
  Don't worry, they drill more geography in you before high school than they do here throughout high school. Teaching foreign languages starts from kindergarten. By high school if you're inclined and had good teachers you should know enough to have an ok conversation in at least two different languages. Plus you get exposed to so much to English / Spanish (you hear the original soundtrack for every movie for example) that you could learn a lot just from listening. I'm not sure about philosophy though, that would be a loss.(salutari)
- yummyfajitas 15y ago
  Compare unemployment rates in geography, philosophy and foreign languages. We need more CS people. We don't need more philosophers. (Though admittedly, knowledge of English or German might be very useful if you are coming from Romania.)
  - rgrieselhuber 15y ago
    > We don't need more philosophers. Agreed but imagine how boring CS would be if people were ignorant of all of those other subjects.

JonWood 15y ago

I'm not convinced by the idea of heavily specialised high schools. At that age you should be discovering what you're passionate about, and sampling a wide range of subjects. The focus here seems to be more on training kids up for a job - would anyone be so enthusiastic if we replaced "software engineering" with "assembly line work" or "street sweeping"?

digitallimit0 15y ago
The thing is, those aren't fair comparisons. Software engineers are in exceedingly high demand at this stage. This is just a reaction to that demand. In addition, software engineering is a very flexible field. You can engineer under or tangentially to almost any position or field and be a part of what makes those things interesting. Assembly line worker and street sweeper are not so similarly blessed.
- randomdata 15y ago
  > Software engineers are in exceedingly high demand at this stage. When I was in high school, teachers were in exceedingly high demand. Because of this, teaching was a career highlighted often by our teachers. The result is that most of my friends ended up choose teaching careers; along with a significant number of others in my age group. I have watched my friends really struggle to find work in the field and a couple have even chosen to leave the field altogether because there are far more people than jobs now. Anyway, the point is that being forcefully reactive to the problem of career demands is never a good idea. You will just end up with a bunch of highly trained people who are unable to use those skills. I do not believe that software development is immune to this fact: Both teaching and programming are skills that are useful everywhere, but it still didn't help my friends. The market will naturally sort itself out. As pay for programers rises, more people will become interested in the field until the pay declines again. The influx becomes manageable this way. Any additional incentives will cause the problems above. It is best to not mess with the market.
- nik_0_0 15y ago
  True, they aren't exactly fair comparisons, but I find them relevant. I recall just a few days ago, there was a discussion how "everyone" should be able to program, and a lot of the value comes from applying that programming to another, personally interesting field. I remember a quote "in 10 years not being able to program will be like not being able to...". No matter what that last word is, I agree with the above statements, a school so focused on one thing needs to give the students a chance to probe their other interests, ones they can use their software engineering prowess to excel at. I think this is a great idea, but hope that in 10 years the kids who only have experience in software engineering do not become a commodity.

jrockway 15y ago

I'm not sure it's a great idea to get so focused at such an early age. There's a lot to learn about the world when you're 14, and it might be good to explore a wide range of topics. (I personally took most of my "real" classes in high school, so by the time I got to college, I had an idea of what I wanted to do. After going to college for a year, I realized my needs would not be met in that way. But deciding at 20 is a lot different from deciding at 14.)

mjwalshe 15y ago
Yes you do need to have a wider range than just CS In fact a lot of what industy needs is more Computer Enginering and lees hyper secpecialised CS majors - you dont see Audi or Mercedes saying we need engineers lets train a load of physicists.
- beatle 15y ago
  Role reversal: Employers say they can't find workers http://lifeinc.today.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/01/13/10142795-role-reversal-employers-say-they-cant-find-workers http://lifeinc.today.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/01/13/10142795...
- tghw 15y ago
  Computer Engineering is generally hardware and firmware design, something that is becoming less and less important as generalized processors have become smaller, cheaper, and more powerful. At this point, almost everything can be done in software, so a Computer Science degree is more important. Also, your Audi/Mercedes analogy is flawed. Physicists and engineers are very different, and if they needed more engineers, they would sponsor engineering schools. Right now we need more software developers, so training kids in Computer Science makes complete sense. Some schools (including my alma mater) do provide a separate Software Engineering degree, but they generally overlap so much with CS as to be virtually indistinguishable. It's also somewhat laughable to call Software Engineering "engineering", as there is a general lack of rigor and no formal qualification for software engineers like there is for every other branch of engineering.

johnrob 15y ago

I am certain that if this thing actually happens, it will spin out companies on par with any accelerator.

jilebedev 15y ago

As a person who finds immeasurable delight in programming, I am immediately wary of this idea. My impression is that this HS's curriculum would be narrower than usual, to accommodate a deep focus on SEG. If that is the case, I feel this is a disservice to young humans: we ought to be exposing them to as broad a range of human thought as possible, and not narrowly focusing on a passion. The idea (as I understand it) seems to be a recipe for producing narrow humans.

blueprint 15y ago
If they learn to engineer software, surely they'll know how to access Wikipedia.
- jilebedev 15y ago
  Education not only teaches facts, but efficiently exposes a person to unknown unknowns. I'd argue that a student-teacher conversation is more efficient at exposing a student to an unknown unknown, than Wikipedia would be.
  - blueprint 15y ago
    Could you share one or two unknown unknowns to which you were exposed in school?
- LargeWu 15y ago
  Learning how to accumulate facts is a completely different problem than learning how to think about ideas. I think teaching children how to think about things is far more important than focusing on specific skills at that age, even if they are useful skills.
  - blueprint 15y ago
    How can one confirm the benefit that thinking has had in one's life? From my point of view, it's more important to know both the principle and the problems (questions) that determine the results that exist in the world, rather than learning how to think about how to solve problems. It's my experience that I have to think when there's an important fact that I haven't realized.

toblender 15y ago

This is fantastic! This is the same thing I want to start in China someday.

vigilanteweb 15y ago

I think this is great. The kids who are going to be applying and accepted to this school already have the desire to pursue CS and I would imagine are already investigatingthe topic on their own time. To be able to be exposed to formalized education in a field that you're already excited about is an amazing opportunity.

systemizer 15y ago

I love computers and I work with them everyday, but I believe the idea of a high school geared primarily towards software engineering is wrong. Computer Science teaches you to think logically about problems. It gives you primitives to build complex systems that will later help you understand the world. In fact, most computer scientists think the same when they approach a problem. But there are other kinds of thinking that are also important which high schools should introduce to students. Art. Music. Athletics. Each subject requires you to think in a different way. I will always remember what Marvin Minsky told me when I was taking his class: when he approaches a problem, he first chooses how he will think, not how he will approach the problem itself. He also said that he studied how the great minds of the past approached problems so that he could think like them. Do I want to think like a Richard Feynman or an Albert Einstein? Have you ever thought about that question and what it means? If not, I recommend you start reading books that they've written so you can try to capture that brilliance.

tikhonj 15y ago
That's a false dichotomy--a school focusing on CS does not preclude covering other subjects well. I doubt anybody wants to do away with art or music or English--rather, they want to take the existing curriculum and add CS, more than they've been able at normal schools. Both my father and my uncle went to a mathematically oriented school in Russia; however, this does not mean their education suffered. What it meant was that on top of doing normal school, they had more math taught at a faster pace. Specializing in high school does not stop you from getting a well rounded education, but it can provide focus and ensures an exceptionally thorough grounding in whatever subject you're specializing in.

seer 15y ago

I am actually astonished that this is the first time something like this is tried in the US. And I also don't understand the negative comments here in HN - most of you guys probably had a passion for computers at even earlier age and would have enjoyed this kind of school greatly. Here In the Sofia (the capital of Bulgaria) this is long established practice - we have loosely specialized schools and students decide where hey want to learn at about 13 years of age. You can of course switch schools as you like, but more prestigious ones have some requirements. The point is that I did know I wanted to work with computers and made this decision then to go to he programming school here and I consider this one of he best decisions in my life. Most of my classmates have ended up with quite accomplished careers in IT but a surprising number end up with very different professions - doctors, dentists, musicians - the emphasis on programming did not hinder their progress that much maybe even helped hem.

tokenadult 15y ago
I am actually astonished that this is the first time something like this is tried in the US. And I also don't understand the negative comments here in HN Specialized high schools are moderately common in the United States, some organized as general public schools, and some organized as "charter" schools (a form of regulation in the United States with public funding, but less public funding than most schools, and some variation in regulations that apply to general public schools). In my part of the United States, Minnesota, there is public school open enrollment (any student can enroll in any public school district, anywhere in the state) and quite a few charter schools (Minnesota was the first state to have any charter schools). My public school district receives students from forty-one public school districts, the farthest one more than 100 miles away. (I've heard that the child stays with relatives during the school week and goes back to his parents' home on weekends. That is perfectly legal here in Minnesota.) There is another charter school, far across the metropolitan area from where I live, that purports to be a Math and Science Academy. http://www.mnmsa.org/ http://www.mnmsa.org/ But as I think any European or east Asian reader of the school's website will soon recognize, the Math and Science Academy charter school in Minnesota does not have a credible academic program in mathematics or science up to international standards. (One of my good friends had a child in that school, and she is bitterly disappointed by how much the school killed her daughter's interest in mathematics and science with its underchallenging curriculum.) A regular public school in Minnesota is permitted to have an internal program that is academically selective, for example a "school within a school" for gifted students, as my local school district does http://www.minnetonka.k12.mn.us/ACADEMICS/NAVIGATORPROGRAM/Pages/default.aspx http://www.minnetonka.k12.mn.us/ACADEMICS/NAVIGATORPROGRAM/P... and as other Minnesota public school districts had first. http://www.invergrove.k12.mn.us/atheneum.html http://www.invergrove.k12.mn.us/atheneum.html http://www.springlakeparkschools.org/schools/la/la_lighthouse.asp http://www.springlakeparkschools.org/schools/la/la_lighthous... http://department.services.bloomington.k12.mn.us/modules/cms/pages.phtml?pageid=201931&sessionid= http://department.services.bloomington.k12.mn.us/modules/cms... By contrast, charter schools in Minnesota cannot be academically selective in any way, but must accept all applicants (which is also the plan for the New York City school in the submitted article), allocating spaces by lottery if the number of applicants exceeds the number of spaces. That is one of several ways in which regulations on charter schools are more restrictive than the regulations on regular public school districts. Minnesota has a specialized program for mathematics only http://www.mathcep.umn.edu/umtymp/ http://www.mathcep.umn.edu/umtymp/ that draws in students from all over the Twin Cities metropolitan area for classes at the University of Minnesota. I like that program a lot. My oldest son is an alumnus, and I will have two other children take that program's qualifying test in a few months, for two different entry points into that program. In general, the cultural attitude in the United States is highly hostile to advanced programs for bright learners, as you can see in some of the comments here. Many programs for "gifted" students may not even have added value for academic growth, http://educationnext.org/poor-results-for-high-achievers/ http://educationnext.org/poor-results-for-high-achievers/ academic achievement even in wealthy school districts is often below the standards achieved in poorer countries, http://globalreportcard.org/ http://globalreportcard.org/ and the United States especially lags behind in teaching mathematics to its most advanced students. http://www.hks.harvard.edu/pepg/PDF/Papers/PEPG10-19_HanushekPetersonWoessmann.pdf http://www.hks.harvard.edu/pepg/PDF/Papers/PEPG10-19_Hanushe... So I'm glad to see the New York City experiment in offering a software engineering high school, and will be curious to see if that example is imitated in other parts of the United States.

postfuturist 15y ago

I'm so jealous of people who had the opportunity to take CS classes in high school (none at mine). I've seriously considered volunteering to teach intro CS classes at local high schools, just to pay it forward, I guess. I'd done some BASIC and C programming by the time I entered high school, and I would have taken any programming or CS classes in a heartbeat.

smithhallam 15y ago

Almost makes me wish I was born in america. I can't think of anything like this over here in England.

mattm 15y ago
Not for programming per say but a different way of eduction - http://www.summerhillschool.co.uk/ http://www.summerhillschool.co.uk/

bri3d 15y ago

This is awesome, and I would have loved to go to a school like this. However, I wonder if the school will become a place for people who are passionate about software to expand their coding talent at an early age, or if it'll become a place for kids whose parents want them to make money later in life to slog their way through a curriculum. It seems like there's a mixture of both types even in college CS programs, and one kind is a lot more pleasurable to learn with (as well as a lot more useful) than the other.

tomjen3 15y ago

Hmm, won't that be a problem for the students given that the ratio of males to females is going to be far from 1:1?

YuriNiyazov 15y ago

I went to Stuyvesant HS 10 years ago, and I took all the CS classes that the school had offered from Mr. Zamansky ("Z", as we affectionately call him), and can add some more specific information as to why this was necessary. Stuyvesant opened in the beginning of the 20th century, and there are some vestigial components that should've been amputated long ago: in addition to the standard math, science, language (English and foreign), gym requirements, it has some requirements that truly made it historically a technical vocational school. To wit: 1 year of technical drafting (1 semester of drawing mechanical designs on paper, 1 semester of CAD), and 1.5 years of technical shop (1 semester of single-period shop, and 1 semester of double-period shop). By technical shop I mean the following: you get to choose two of ceramics, woodworking, metalworking (aka jewelry-making), electronics (aka computer tech), photography and video editing. It's worth repeating: taking drafting and shop is required to graduate. By and large, these classes are not popular with students at all, the most obvious reason being "why the hell do we need to know this outdated shit? If someone likes it, they can take it as an elective." Over the years, Z developed an ass-kicking CS curriculum: Intro to CS, AP CS (1 year), Systems/Network Programming, Graphics, and Independent Research. They are extraordinarily popular with the students, partially because Z is a great teacher, and partially because of the support of the previous alumni who would regularly take junior and senior-level college classes in their freshman college year thanks to that curriculum. It's worth pointing out that none of the CS classes qualify for any graduation requirement. If you take them, you are taking them on your own time because you are interested. Aside from the knowledge itself, there's no carrot, even though the rest of the world is pointedly indicating that we need more software engineers and less metalworkers. Now, Z goes to the current school administration and says "hey, can we add CS as an option to fulfill some graduation requirements?" and for 10 years straight (not kidding) the response he was getting was a consistent "GFY". Welcome to the NYC public school bureaucracy and people defending their own turf. It's not even that he asked anything outrageous. He didn't say "Hey, can we get rid of drafting and shop?". He said "Can we give our students more choice as to what is required to graduate?" So, about two years ago Z decided to try a different avenue - working within the structure of Stuyvesant was not feasible, so he might as well go outside of it. Someone I know connected him to Fred Wilson, they chatted, and the rest is what you see in front of you. None of this would've happened if the Stuy HS administration had a few less heads up their asses.

ambertch 15y ago

About time! I would actually accept a much lower wage than in industry (as long as I could live off it - which I doubt would be very low in NYC haha) to teach at such a school

feralchimp 15y ago

One of my dreams upon someday achieving FU money is to found a school like this in my home town (Rochester, NY). They need it.

mikecaron 15y ago

If my girls show any interest in CS, I'm moving the family to NYC. Done.

molmalo 15y ago

I don't know if that's novel in the US, but this is pretty common here in Argentina. Secondary school here takes 5 years. Where I did it (1997-2001), before starting the 3rd year (14 years old), we had to choose the speciality (software engeneering, chemistry, civil engeneering, media and communications, musical production, business administration, electronic engeneering, graphic design). I choose software (while most of my friends of that time choose electrinics engeneering). The next three years we had lots of subjects related to CS. This is what I learned there: - Computer architecture, - Networking (osi model, ip stack, that sort of things), algorithms, - Structural programming (1st year), then oop (2nd year) (with C and C++), then Events Driven Programming with VB6 (3rd year) - systems analysis and design, database design (er model) - internet programming (back then, that was ASP, CSS and Javascript) And all along the final year, we had a subject called Final Project, where we had to develop (from the requeriments to the implementantion) a REAL system (mostly done for family companies or NGO's ). When I finished high school I was really prepared to start working, so I did, while at the same time, started going to the university. I can tell that it was REALLY easy to do my grad career because of my background. Even when at University some topics where seen in much deeper detail, i did it much faster than other people, because I already had my mind used to that things, and I just needed to learn the details. But then again, even when I keept studing CS, some of my high school classmates chose other things to study (e.g: medicine, law school, economics, etc). But I think anyway that I must have to be a good experience for them, at least to learn that CS was not for them, and dont lose their time later. Hope it helps!

molmalo 15y ago
I need to add that it was a private school (sadly, public school here is going down the tubes). And that CS subjects were additional to the standard subjects (maths, literature, geography, history, foreign language, philosofy, sports, etc).

snikolov 15y ago

There is a lot of worry in this thread about the curriculum being too narrow. While I do not know how it will work in this new school, let me offer some perspective as a Stuyvesant alum. Like many have said, it can be possible to have a "normal" school with all the usual subjects in addition to a prominent computer science program. Take my experience, for example: Freshman year I learned things like recursion, Scheme, dynamic programming, and cellular automata. Sophomore year, I learned basic data structures and algorithms and wrote a couple of games. Junior year I learned systems programming in C, signals, processes, network communication and wrote a filesharing system. The next semester I wrote a computer graphics engine from scratch --- all the way from line drawing to complex lighting and implementing an animation and scene graph language. I also took the independent research class where I worked on information retrieval research. I am not bragging. This is typical (in fact, many of the projects, or variations thereof, are things that everybody in those classes does). And yet, I still took tons of math, physics, chemistry, european history, american history, classical literature, modern literature, tech shop, architecture, and many other things. This was also typical! Other kids took the same common stuff but instead of so much computer science and math they took special electives in philosophy, literature, history, economics, and so on. You really can fit all that stuff in. Stuyvesant is a great example that you can have a serious, multi-year computer science program and still have more than enough focus on other subjects.

dr_ 15y ago

This is interesting, but I'm not certain there need be an institution with just a heavy interest on software engineering. The article suggests that there are those who may not be proficient at other academic pursuits, but may have a keen interest in software engineering. To be honest, most of those kids are the types who will start coding/hacking on their own, not sure if a special school is needed for this. Plus there are added benefits to learning english, the arts, maybe a foreign language - I feel all of these have an impact on the type of person you become, perhaps even the type of software engineer you become. Just like it is with medical school - in many countries you go to medical school straight from high school, but here you complete 4 years of college first. In those four years you learn certain things which med school won't cover and which you may never be able to learn at any point again - but they could have a significant impact on the type of doctor you become, esp in how you interact with your patients. I feel the same applies to any career choice, including software engineering.

snikolov 15y ago
To be honest, most of those kids are the types who will start coding/hacking on their own, not sure if a special school is needed for this I might be a special case but for what it's worth: I didn't start programming until I was a freshman at Stuyvesant High School. I took the intro course on a whim and was hooked. If the computer science program didn't exist, I might not have gotten into it. I was more into art than math/cs back then. I didn't have much of an environment to discover that I loved programming before that, and I bet many other kids don't either.

mkramlich 15y ago

from the article: "Starting salaries for smart programmers from top schools are flirting with the $100,000 mark. " By that logic, we better start churning out more doctors, lawyers and CEOs because, gosh, the salaries for those folks are flirting way way past the $100k mark. And we can't have that! "One of the reasons the elite US colleges seem to turn out so few computer science majors every year is that they are only drawing from a narrow pool of mostly white and asian males." Ooooh... we definitely can't have that! There's also a startingly low percentage of redheads and part-time harpists. Let's fix this, stat.

zwilliamson 15y ago

It is too bad our country doesn't care about education. All I hear about on the morning news in California is Jerry Brown making cuts to public spending on education. My wife and I put a lot of time into tutoring our daughter (1st grade) and it would be nice to know that by the time she reached the secondary education level that an option like a Software Engineering focus was available to her. I will try to stay positive and vote for government officials who support creative and proactive educational systems like this.

borski 15y ago

As a Stuyvesant alum and a supporter of Z (a.k.a. Mike Zamansky), I can't wait to see what Z does here. While Stuy was immensely fulfilling and I learned a lot, it was not thanks to the general history and drafting classes. While those were (sometimes) interesting, it was the fact that I was no longer bored as I was in JHS and got to take subjects that allowed to me excel and "stretch my brain," for lack of a better term. Those were limited to my CS classes (Z's classes), the math classes, and psychology. The CS courses I took at Stuy were on par with, and occasionally better than, some of the courses I took at MIT. At the very least, it prepared me to do very well at MIT and allowed me to take more advanced courses. If it hadn't been for Z, I know for a fact I would have been significantly more bored in HS and probably wouldn't have done as well. Being a part of the 'Z-Team,' as we affectionally called the network team at Stuy (yes, we were lucky enough to have a network team; sadly, due to the roadblocks placed in front of Z, I'm not even sure this exists anymore) was easily the best experience of my academic career up until that point, and one I still fondly look back upon. I truly can't wait to see what Z does with a bit of freedom to build what he's been trying to build for over 10 years.

mathattack 15y ago

My 2 cents on the "too specialized" arguments... 1 - In high school, the people who take multiple CS subjects tend to be intellectually curious, and good at many other things. The same folks who took AP CS with me also took AP European history. I suspect it will be similar here. 2 - Similar to what folks say about Stuyvesant, I don't think there will be a crowding out effect of other subjects. 3 - If done right, the teachers can connect many other subjects to computer science: Philosophy, Mathematics, the Scientific Method... This can make those topics more interesting, not less. 4 - The rigor of learning to program is applicable in many other fields. Computer Science grads frequently go into other fields precisely because of this. This diminishes the "Let's fix the software engineering deficit" argument, but it's true that CS as a major signals ability above and beyond programming. If I had grown up in NYC, I would have done anything to go to this school. I am glad that my children might have the opportunity to go to a place like this if they so desire.