[striking]

> what bunch of high school students wouldn't want an IT class that taught compiler design

The majority of high school students can hardly wrap their brains around the AP curriculum (probably for lack of time or effort, rather than ability). There are some that are honestly, actually interested in computer science and are thus capable of stuff like that... but they are low in number.

What might be able to work is a fully-fledged web design course, using modern standards instead of boring stuff from ten years ago. With HTML, CSS, and finally JS (probably React, then Node). Maybe even SQL. With knowledge like that, you have more than enough of a base upon which to stand. You could likely even get a job.

> Even Python is more fun than spreadsheets, right?

Spreadsheets are easy computation for a wide audience, with a little learning curve. What can Python do, out of the box? What could you convince a high school kid to program with it that isn't a derivative of "10 PRINT HELLO WORLD; 20 GOTO 10;" ?

[az0xff]

A course designed around using a particular "modern" web technology stack will have to change too often (every time it doesn't become "modern" anymore) for it to be sustainable. Imagine that in 2016 you have a course centered around using what was modern in 2006. That would inevitably happen with a course like that.

I'd rather teach programming from 0 to making a really basic 2D game (be it in C++ or Python or whatever language and whatever library). The results are eye-catching and the coding process is engaging, and there's no need for it to rely too much on how trendy the framework is in the current year.

[striking]

I love games as an introduction to programming. But then you have to teach kids how to do collisions (or physics), you have to teach them how to keep track of multiple sprites that behave the same but are in different places at the same time (I'm talking about classes, yes), and it's harder to point to a "real world" usage of game programming... which makes it harder to get your course approved.

I know, teaching today's web standards means they'll be out of date within the next ten years. But I believe the improvement of the web is asymptotic and will slowly come to a halt in the coming years... that and I would never forgive myself for not refreshing a course when it's too old to be applied to the real world, as a pragmatist. Finally, I don't think Vue will beat React too quickly.

(I'm not an educator, but I've spoken with a few on some of these topics.)

[gizmo686]

I went to a private school, where the only CS class was game programming; and it was offered as an art elective [0]. The class itself was very much a programming class, requiring only a couple of supplemental lunch time classes to be prepared for the AP exam [1].

[0] According to the teacher, the class was originally planned as offering a CS credit; but was changed to art when they realized that a CS credit is not a graduation requirement, while art credits were.

[1] This was not out of the norm for my school. The only class that was designed for the AP was calculus.

[c22]

When I taught myself basic as a child I did so by building my own single-user dungeon. In my first c class in high school the project was to create a playable terminal-based hangman game. Neither of these engaging projects required me to learn anything about physics or sprites. Though I did build an ascii-animated hanging sequence for those who lost at hangman.