For Educators

The World Is Changing

The ability to build software, for seventy years concentrated in the small group of people who could write code, is being handed to everyone. Anyone with a vision can now realize it. This is what computing education always said it wanted: democratization, access, everyone building. It's here.

So we get to decide what comes next. What do students need to learn when the machine handles the syntax? What new skills matter? What does it look like to teach someone to build through conversation? These are open questions, and nobody has answered them yet, including us.

What We're Trying

Conversational Programming is a first course with no prerequisites, running at Illinois in Fall 2026 as CS 199 ASK. Students build real software, websites, tools, games, and analyses, by working with an AI coding agent, and they never read or write a line of code. It's a studio: most of the time is spent building, the rest looking at each other's work, and students watch each other work with the agent as much as they critique what comes out. There are no lectures. Grading is participation.

The honest premise is that nobody knows how to teach this skill yet. Most courses that try start with the computer science we used to have to teach first. We start with nothing and let the students, the agent, and the work tell us what actually needs to be learned. The course is the experiment. The syllabus says all of this in more detail, and it will change as the semester teaches us things.

AI has what researchers call jagged intelligence: brilliant at some tasks, surprisingly weak at others, with edges that move as the technology does. Our students will find those edges, and so will we. Part of teaching this is learning to recognize where the agent struggles and helping students work around it. That's the frontier, and we're exploring it together.

Follow Along

We're looking for educators who are excited about what comes next. If you want to follow along, borrow what works, or eventually run the course yourself, leave your address below. Expect a message every few weeks during the semester: what we're learning, and what we're using. What we make for the course, the syllabus, week plans, and activities, goes up on this site as we use it, whether or not you sign up. Every message has an unsubscribe link, and you'll confirm by email before anything is sent.

You don't have to be in computing. If you teach writing, design, or studio critique, you already teach most of this course, and we'd rather learn from you than reinvent it. A unit inside your own course counts too; it doesn't have to be a whole semester. And "we," for now, is me and the students. There's no team yet, which is part of the invitation.

Or just write: challen@illinois.edu. I'd like to hear what you're trying too.