teach_cs

A proposed community-college computer-science curriculum, published as a working research site at fansofhenry.github.io/teach_cs. Built by Henry Fan as a design artifact for doctoral applications in computing education research, with mentor Prof. Jeff Anderson (Foothill College Math).

A proposal in development — not a currently taught program. The curriculum is the thing being researched. Henry is an Application Support Analyst at CVC-OEI / Foothill–De Anza CCD and Jeff Anderson's research mentee; he is not currently faculty at any community college.

What this repo contains

• Six original courses for a community-college CS pathway: CS 180 (Intro AI), CS 185 (Intro ML), CS 210 (Data Structures & Algorithms), CS 175 (How Things Work), Math 2B (Applied Linear Algebra), ENGR 11 (Programming & Problem Solving).
• Four equity-overlay adaptations of Andrew Ng's Coursera sequence (AI For Everyone, ML Specialization, Deep Learning Specialization, Generative AI For Everyone).
• Build a Computer, a 20-week signature project embedded inside CS 175.
• A research hub (/research, /research/modeling-bench) describing the four research questions the curriculum is designed to investigate, the working papers in progress, and the PhD timeline.
• A public log (/log), philosophy page, learning paths, and reading list.

Stack

• Next.js 16 (App Router) compiled to a static export (output: "export").
• Tailwind CSS v4 with @theme inline tokens and a local design system (ink, paper, cream, red, etc.).
• TypeScript throughout.
• Deployed as GitHub Pages under basePath: "/teach_cs". There is no server — every route prerenders as static HTML at build time.
• One build-time post-process script (scripts/fix-og-image.mjs) renames dynamically-generated Open Graph images into the subpath-safe locations GitHub Pages needs.

Architecture notes

• All content lives in lib/data/, not in JSX. courses.ts, philosophy.ts, tracks.ts, projects.ts, research.ts, modelingBench.ts, log.ts, peerTraining.ts, studentSuccess.ts. Types are consolidated in lib/data/types.ts.
• Page-level components in app/<route>/page.tsx import from lib/data/ and render. The /courses catalog uses a client component (CourseCatalog.tsx) for search/filter state; the rest are server components.
• Shared chrome (Navbar, Footer) lives in components/. The navbar owns a localStorage-backed light/dark toggle.
• OpenGraph images are generated per-route via Next's opengraph-image.tsx convention. Because GitHub Pages serves under /teach_cs, the post-build script rewrites the emitted filenames.

Local development

npm install
npm run dev     # http://localhost:3000

The dev server respects basePath — the site is served at http://localhost:3000/teach_cs/.

Building and deploying

npm run build   # next build && node scripts/fix-og-image.mjs

The build emits a fully static site into out/. GitHub Actions (or a manual git push to the main branch — Pages is configured to build from out/) publishes the contents of out/ to gh-pages. No runtime.

A note on framing

Because this site is read by PhD search committees, the repo keeps two strict framing rules:

1. Don't overclaim institutional roles. Henry is a curriculum designer and Jeff Anderson's research mentee, not a principal investigator or a community-college CS instructor. Any page copy that drifts into "the research emerges from teaching six courses" gets corrected to the proposal-framing voice. See the /research page for the canonical phrasing.
2. Don't flatten original work into adaptation. The catalog surfaces the split between original courses and Andrew Ng adaptations explicitly (lib/data/courses.ts → getCoreCourses() / getNgAdaptations()), and page copy is expected to name both categories rather than roll up to a single number.

If you're editing copy and are unsure which voice applies, start from /research or /about — they're the calibrated references.

Contact

• Henry Fan — henry@henryfan.org
• Research portfolio: fansofhenry.github.io/cs-ed
• GitHub: @fansofhenry