In teaching university entry-level calculus, it proved useful to distinguish two strategies - early transcendentals or late transcendentals - depending on the time at which transcendentals such as the exponential and logarithmic functions are introduced. In this lightning talk, I suggest we pose analogous “early X or late X” questions for first-year computer science courses. I propose a tentative list of concepts for which the “early or late” question might be worthy a discussion and argue that the approach allows us to pay attention to pedagogical choices rather than superficial features such as choice of the programming language used for CS1 and CS2.

The guiding motivation for Martin’s work is the scalability of experiential learning. He has led the flagship programming course CS1101S for first-year students of the School of Computing at the National University of Singapore (NUS) since 2012, founded the experiential course CS4215 Programming Language Implementation, and extensively subscribes to SoC’s project-based course CP3108 for experiential learning.

The work on CS1101S culminated in the textbook Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, JavaScript Edition, by Harold Abelson and Gerald J. Sussman, adapted to JavaScript by Martin Henz and Tobias Wrigstad with Julie Sussman, published by MIT Press in April 2022. Martin is the initiator of the Source Academy, an immersive online experiential environment for learning programming used in CS1101S and at the University of San Francisco. He designs and develops open-source software on GitHub, co-founded the software company Workforce Optimizer Pte Ltd with Alan Sevugan, and supervised Rahul Singhal’s PhD, which led to the formation of the education-A.I. company Cerebry.

Martin founded the multidisciplinary initiatives NUS Seafarers, a programme for maritime exploration that was active 2017-2020, FrogWorks, a prototyping studio at the iDP in the NUS Faculty of Engineering that was active 2011-2016, and The Physics of Sailing, a collaboration with NUS physics professors that was active 2011-2017.