Toward True Differentiated Instruction with PathMX and Curriculum as Code

Mark Johnson and Chris Alvin

Department of Computer Science, Furman University

CCSCNE 2026

The Problem

My experience as a first-time CS1 teacher:

  • Students were mostly non-majors
  • A large variety of backgrounds and experiences
  • A variety of interests and learning preferences

Fall 2025 CSC-121

  • 41% no prior programming experience
  • 47% less than one year
  • 12% one to three years

How to meet each student where they are at?

Differentiated instruction.

Tomlinson describes in her foundational work, differentiated instruction is

“a philosophy of teaching rooted in deep respect for students, acknowledgment of their differences, and the drive to help all students thrive”

This is hard to do! Especially when class sizes are large and you are using a curriculum that is not designed for this.

Tools like Cursor, and Claude Code live along side your code and can write code on demand

A quick demo...

What if we wrote curriculum as code?

Introducing PathMX

  • PathMX is a methodology for writing curriculum as code
  • Based on open standards and conventional tools
  • Friendly for humans and agents

Lab Demo

We're going to differentiate this Python Lab live!

Volunteer time...

  1. A favorite programming language (not Python)? OCaml
  2. Favorite science fiction movie or book? Star Trek
  3. A difficulty level (easy, medium, hard)? Medium

What makes this work?

  • Context: Legible, descriptive context is king (for humans and agents!)
  • Human-first Authoring: AI agents only for differentiation and scaffolding
  • Simple: Files in a folder: Agents can ls, grep, find, cp, mv, etc.
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The PathMX Development Framework

  • What I'm using for these slides and the pathmx.dev site
  • Currently in early beta
  • Looking for feedback and collaborators
  • Contact Mark Johnson to get involved
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