I'm a high school student (currently a senior) who first discovered Clojure in 9th grade. It opened my eyes to the world of functional programming and Lisps, and helped me fall in love with programming again after getting bored with Python. While Clojure is still the functional programming language I'm most comfortable with (my website is written from scratch in it!), I was so taken with the idea of functional programming that I decided to explore languages like Haskell, OCaml, APL, and the Wolfram Language as well. The culmination of this interest was the very first iteration of the Paradigm Conference, a conference organized by a team of high school students (including myself) from around the world, aimed entirely at high school students, and dedicated to functional programming languages that are underrepresented in high school computer science curricula.

In my talk, I'd like to explain why Clojure is a great first introduction to the world of object-oriented programming and why it SHOULD be included in high school computer science curricula. I'll talk about my own experiences learning the language, how it inspired me to create a variety of teaching resources for conference attendees, and the impact that learning object-oriented programming had on them. Finally, I'll present a vision for how we might introduce Clojure into high school curricula, by extending parts of the existing AP Computer Science curriculum (written in Java) to Clojure. This talk is meant to be a cross between anecdotal (my experiences learning Clojure, organizing the conference, and seeing its impact on attendees) and visionary (presenting some practical ideas for how we can get more kids interested in my favorite Lisp!).

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