One of the most famous and selective public high schools in the country — around 26,000 students compete for NYC's specialized-school seats every year. Stuyvesant's CS path takes a very different route than most schools: it starts with Racket and NetLogo, not Python or Java.
First semester: programming foundations, recursion, state machines, and cellular automata, built in Racket, ending in a NetLogo final project. Second semester pivots to program-driven webpages, data analysis, Python, and HTML — genuinely one of the more unusual intro sequences among major U.S. high schools.
The standard College Board Java sequence — object-oriented programming, data structures, and algorithms — taught using the Processing graphical framework. Stuyvesant's honors track goes further, modeled after the old AP CS AB level with more advanced data structures and algorithm work.
Once past AP CS A, students branch into electives: Systems-Level Programming drops into C and Linux system calls — low-level memory, storage, and processor access. Computational Media uses py5 (Python's version of Processing) for project-based visual/creative computing. Artificial Intelligence covers search, game-playing, and machine learning with decision trees.