What if generative AI isn’t the enemy of learning to code — but one of the best tools we can hand our students? In this episode, host Julie York sits down with Dr. Beth Simon and Dr. Kate Lockwood, two CS educators bridging the high school-to-college divide, to talk about a new CSTA professional development course that charts a practical middle path between banning AI and going full vibe-code. They share how focused, free tools and simple sentence frames can help students build stronger debugging, testing, and critical thinking skills — and why the conversation matters now more than ever.
Podcast Transcript
Welcome to one Voice in cs, a podcast made to empower computer science educators by providing resources and a platform to share their CS journey and educational experiences. This podcast is brought to you by the Computer Science Teacher Association. For this episode, I’m your host, Julie York from South Portland High School in South Portland, Maine.
On this episode, our topic is why Gen AI and CS one. We’ll explore how gen AI supports core programming skills and aligns with industry trends and student behavior. Our guests today are Dr. Beth Simon and Dr. Kate Lockwood. Both experts in the field enjoy. So thank you so much for joining us today. To start.
I’d love if you could share a brief introduction of who you are and how you got into this work for the audience.
Oh, hi. I’m Dr. Kate Lockwood. I teach high school computer science in Minnesota at an infinite high school. And I got into this work because I really actually love teaching intro programming or advanced programming, and. As I saw gen AI start to come out, I wanted my students to see it as another tool, and I wanted to partner with them in thinking about how can we use this new tool to make us better programmers and move away from the narrative that this tool is gonna replace programmers.
It’s just gonna make us better programmers. So that’s how I got into this work. And then I met Beth at CSTA last year, and. That’s how I’m here. Absolutely. And my name is Dr. Beth Simon, and for the first 10 years of my career, I focused on teaching introductory programming over CS one at the University of California at San Diego for computer science majors, or as I call them, baby software developers.
And that was really my focus and I did a lot of research on improving outcomes in that course, et cetera. But about 10 years ago, I switched to supporting K 12 teachers and preparing them to teach our computer, our students in K 12. But my good colleague and former mentee Dr. Leo Porter.
Recently, in the last few years, really got in on the ground floor of we have to change how we teach University CS one at least using to embrace generative AI because basically every single assignment you have even three years ago with generative AI could be done pretty well by it. Luckily, he is also an expert in introductory programming and best practices for supporting student learning in that. So he took that background and he learned about what was, happening in the industry. And he put that together into a textbook for Intro to Programming. And they’ve been teaching that at UCSD for three years.
So then I come along and I’m like, wait. If we’re changing what we’re doing at the university and we’re embracing and intentionally requiring students to use gendered ai, then if we don’t also talk about doing that in our high school classrooms, then I feel we’re rep likely to replicate the old digital divide that we used to talk about in terms of internet access.
And I see it a potential. New student class coming in where half of the students were supported in learning how to use generative AI to support their development of coding skills and understanding. And then a group that didn’t. And so that’s where I got involved as director, co-director of the generative AI and Computer Science Education Consortium and partnered with CSTA to help develop some online professional development for teachers to just.
Open the conversation about how we might use generative AI in our high school classrooms to support our learning outcomes. I love that you’re both teachers. I, first of all, I love that you’re both teachers, but I also love that you’re a high school teacher and a college teacher, so you’ve got that flow because as you said just now, Beth, the idea that as a high school teacher, if we don’t teach ’em how to use the tool, then when they get to college they are at a disadvantage.
And Kate, when you had mentioned, using the tool and embracing the tool and showing students how to use the tool, you’re preparing students. In a way to know how to use it in the appropriate ways and to know how to use it well so you’ve made this course
are you the only two that worked on this course? We are. And in fact, we can tell you the story of how this has come to be because we’re already looking at our second version of the course and that is. Dramatically improves and that’s thanks to Kate. Due to some funding requirements and deadlines, I got put in the awful position in spring and early summer of 2025, where I needed to create this six hour PD course for CSTA in a matter of six weeks.
And without having the ability to really collaborate with teachers, which is. Totally the wrong way to do this. But what I did leverage was again, this textbook that’s being used and the expertise of my colleagues who, who wrote it, and knowing them very well along with my years and years of experience of supporting teachers who are teaching A-P-C-S-A.
And so I tried to meld those two together and produce something that was as flexible as possible. ’cause all teachers teach, even if they’re just teaching A-P-C-S-A, have different environments and different restrictions, et cetera. And so this was, again, a as general thing as possible, but it covers everything from a.
How can we use generative AI to support creating an understanding code to understand better the debugging process? When kids debug a program, do you know what they really learn from it? I don’t think we necessarily do. Test cases is not something that normally I usually feel like I focus on in my CS one, but it becomes a big thing when you’re using generative.
And then I also looked at problem decomposition of, and then honestly, what we, everybody cares about free response questions. Luckily for me, Kate was one of the first piloters of this course and she came in afterwards is look, if we’re moving forward with this, I think we’ve really gotta reduce the amount of content.
And she gave me some great advice. So maybe, Kate, why don’t you describe how we’ve modified the course for this next version. Yeah, so we have a new cohort starting in just a couple of weeks, and I’m really excited to pilot the new content. What we’ve done is condense some of the introductory material.
So we’ve taken out decomposition and practice FRQ questions to really focus on the core programming skills of learning, examining new code, developing test cases, and debugging. Teachers will go through some. Introductory material on all three of those topics. Get a chance to interact a little bit with each other and then create a sample assignment.
So we’re moving to, you’ll leave this class with a classroom ready, peer reviewed either activity or assignment that uses generative AI in one of these three categories. So hopefully we’re giving teachers some tools and some background information. Also access to a community of like-minded teachers who are working together to develop resources and work through what this looks like in our classrooms.
So would you say, Kate if as a teacher I was interested in this course, what would you say is the most important takeaway? Is it that community? Is it the lesson I walk away with? As a teacher yourself? What is the most important, best part of taking this class?
For me personally, I really loved the way that this course changed the discourse around generative AI in a programming classroom. It broke apart the dichotomy of either we’re gonna fully embrace vibe coding, or we’re gonna ban generative AI at the door and dug into how can we use this new tool.
Like we’re saying, like the internet or like any other tool that comes along as a way to support student learning. How can we look at why are students using the tool? How and how can we harness that and give them ways to use the tool productively before they get stuck in that place where they feel like they have to use it to replace the learning that we’re trying to get them to do?
Would you agree? Beth, , that is a hundred percent I completely agree. It’s really taking these two polemic ends of using generative AI and saying, no, we can do something in the middle that aligns with our goals and our learning objectives for students. Yeah, and again, I just reiterate how awesome it is to hear a college teacher talking about that.
As a high school teacher, I can only assume what happens in college classes. So to hear that the, that colleges are starting to talk. About, AI and what is this going to be like? ’cause we can’t ignore that. It exists. Just like you couldn’t exist, you couldn’t ignore the internet existing, certain things you just can’t ignore.
Which brings me to my next question, which is there’s a lot going on about ai. It’s really impossible to avoid and get overwhelmed by. And there’s so many books coming out and articles coming out and news coming out. It’s just, it’s endless. As a teacher, if I’m looking at this PD and I’m already overwhelmed and I’m already thinking, this is one more thing I’m freaked out.
I’m already set to not using it all in my classroom. What do they need to hear? What do they need to know? I would say, you can put aside all of those overwhelming things that pop up in my newsfeed every day and I’m like, oh my, I must do all of that. And honestly, none of that needs to impact how we teach.
Programming in high school, we, if you go through the course, you’re gonna find very simple and understandable tools that we can use. Just within any freely available generative AI that is explicit to Java programming and the kind of Java programming we need kids doing in A-P-C-S-A, and that has nothing to do with anything that’s coming through my feed.
We’re gonna be looking at, we have sentence frames to support students in interacting with prompts. And learning from it. And none of what’s happening and changing and all of that is, has changed at all. Again, I created this course in April and May of 2025 and nothing really from a technical point of view or the capacity of what LLMs can do, none of that has changed.
So it’s good. Maybe just stay cognizant of what’s going on. But all, luckily, none of that is really changing how we wanna use it, I think, in our high school classrooms. Yeah. Yeah, I would totally agree. I think that the, another huge benefit of the class is how focused it is.
So we’re not saying we’re gonna solve all of your AI problems, or we’re gonna tackle everything that generative AI does. We’re going, we’re looking at a specific use case in a specific course, and I think that really helps keep it manageable. How would you, so I’m thinking in terms of the people that are the biggest.
The biggest sticklers for no ai. We’re not going to, we’re not gonna touch it. It’s the devil’s work. It’s gonna take away coding, it’s gonna make, us obsolete. We can’t use ai. It’s gonna hurt the planet. There’s lots of reasons for not wanting to use AI in your computer science class.
And if you had somebody who looked at you and said, a programmer who uses AI isn’t a programmer, what would you say? I would say they’re not living in industry land because something like 97% of software developers in industry report using ai, and that number is honestly just increasing.
And the other thing is. Yes, we hear, I’ll speak specifically to the, we don’t need students to take computer science because it’s, going away but that’s not true because what we find is that in industry, the most effective users of generative AI and software development are the sort of junior level or just above the entry level people.
The people with some experience in putting it together in that. But we still have to get people to be able to think like computer scientists. To so that we have those people to replace. And so maybe it’s not gonna look exactly the same in terms of how students graduate from university and go into that, but we still need those people.
And so that’s what we focus on in this course is it’s not using generative AI to, to replace to create code. And that’s the goal. It’s to use generative AI to scaffold the learning experiences that we’ve always wanted students to have. And that we know some of our students didn’t get or didn’t get as efficiently or as effectively as they might be able to with the support of generative act.
Yeah. And I think also we need to give our students a little bit more credit. I truly believe that my students are taking my computer science class because they wanna learn computer science. They wanna be able to harness the power of programming to create cool new things. And so why do students turn to generative AI or the internet, or a friend any way that students in the past have ever found to create code that isn’t a hundred percent generated by themselves?
It’s because they get. Stuck or they run out of time, all of these things. And if we can teach them how to use the tool more effectively to accomplish both goals, get you over that hurdle, but also further your learning make you a better critical thinker, make you a better problem solver. I think students will take that option.
So we’re just giving them. Just like we’re giving teachers an option between the two extremes, we’re empowering our students with that as well. And I’ll follow up with that to say. I also am, a core person on our University of California San Diego Faculty Learning Committee that spreads across the whole campus on using generative AI on campus.
And in the same way I think we as computer science teachers have always in our hearts of hearts, believe that teaching kids computer science and teaching them to program helps them not just in computer science, but helps them think logically and more critically in every. Other discipline that they’re involved in.
I can tell you that if the kinds of skills and the way we want students to be learning how to work with generative AI to learn to interrogate it, not just to take responses from it, but to think critically about its output and reason about it. Those skills are gonna help your students in the university setting.
In any class they take, having them develop that skills of. Not just using generative AI blindly, but using it critically and thoughtfully. Those are the skills that are gonna help them in any university class they take. I almost feel like you just created a sales pitch for this class, for any class.
It feels like you just made it, English teachers should take this class because this will help, understand we’re focused on computer science education of course, but this could be something that could help a teacher who isn’t a traditional computer science only teacher.
This might be useful for teachers who are doing, math and computer science, or science and computer science. ’cause we’re such a diverse group of teachers. Yeah. Yeah, I honestly think that a lot of the skills, just a lot of the computational think thinking skills translate really well to other disciplines.
I think a lot of these generative AI skills translate really well to other disciplines. And one of the things that comes up again and again in the class or when we’re working with generative ai, our. With our students is really empowering students to think about, what do I wanna interrogate more?
What don’t I understand? So we’re also building that skill of reflecting on their own learning, which I think is applicable. Whether you’re learning how to use a semicolon, write in your English paper or use a semicolon write in your Java program. Absolutely. I’m just so pleased she got the semicolon thing in there that just, oh, I feel so good now.
It’s complete. The semicolon is what was needed for this discussion to take place. And it has occurred gracefully and perfectly, but I appreciate that. ’cause I like, what I like most about teaching is. I like students creating things, and I like giving them tools to be able to create, and I like offering them as many tools as possible and having them all interconnect.
So the idea of understanding that, oh, if you know how to use AI then you’ll be able to really think more. Critically about a lot of things and it will help you be more creative and it will help you speak better and work, more deeply. I think that’s a really good take on it. Is there anything I guess my last question for you before we wrap up with some final thoughts is, a lot of this has been very positive and it’s clear to me that you have a passion for this and that this is something that would help computer science teachers feel.
That it is okay to teach with AI in their classroom because that seems like the goal of this course. Is there anything that you say that you caution people about that you have like little worries or niggling fears yourself about, because you seem very like open to it, but is there anything that you, yourself find a valid fear or concern?
My fear is less about our teachers and who take this course and whatever, but that. That if teachers generally don’t reflectively, think about the assignments that they assign and whether or not they’re asking students to use generative AI in a reflective and critical way or just to use it. And I think that is the, as educators in no matter what discipline that’s on us right now to be using our teacher brains and our expertise and experience to be like, how do we bring critical thinking to the use of this tool? Yeah, I agree. I also worry a little bit about access and equal access to the tools of ai.
We in this class really focus on free tools, chat, gbt, the free version, Gemini, the free versions of AI tools. But as these AI tools evolve and there are different tiers of access, making sure that all of our students have equitable access to the AI tools. That’s a really good point. That’s a really good point.
Especially with all the pay to use models and showing someone something that they can’t have just feels cruel. Like saying this would be great, but you can’t use it unless you spend X amount of dollars, feels rough.
Thank you so much for your time and I appreciate both of you being educators and being willing to speak on this podcast. So thank you for coming. 📍 This has been an episode of One Voice and Cs.
We really appreciate you listening and we’re excited to bring you more. This podcast is supported by the Computer Science Teacher Association. For more information, please follow us at cs teachers org. Thank you very much for listening and take care.