I'll second gogwilt, Mike is an incredible teacher. He created an entire CS program from scratch, which took us (high school kids) from programming 101 to writing raytracers and systems programming in C. (And had an extracurricular class teaching AI from Russell&Norvig)
If you'd like to see solid CS education become widespread, you should absolutely support CSTUY.
Mike Zamansky was my high school CS teacher at Stuy. More than providing me an incredible CS education, he inspired my continued passion for building software.
This is awesome! We've had many initiatives for improving the state of primary school ComSci education (Code Club etc.), it's good to see a project related to highschoolers.
On a little tangent -- I went to an event this weekend called Young ICT Explorers [1], where primary and high school students present projects involving IT that they've been working on for the past 6 months. It's like a science fair for IT. I participated in the competition for every year since its inception until this year where I'm now in uni (hence why I'm giving back).
It was so fantastic to go there and see all of these students passionate about IT, and it was actually astonishing just the calibre of their projects. There was an eight-year old girl who programmed a microcontroller to work with a piano keyboard of sorts, there were yaer 10 students who wrote their own game engines, including a very cool and well-polished pong/breakout mashup. One kid who was in Year 12 actually had written an eLearning management system which he had trademarked and had his school as a client. Crazy!
I would love to start a club like this for techy highschoolers. We have them for sport, we have them for music, why not for IT? Any ideas/thoughts/examples?
If you'd like to see solid CS education become widespread, you should absolutely support CSTUY.