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Table 3 shows the subcategories in this category and the corresponding number of papers published in each decade. As can be seen in Figure 2, interest in this area has slowly declined since the 1990s. Other than language/paradigm choice, one of the most discussed topics in this category has been objects first approaches [12]. At the 2018 Symposium, Simon et al. presented a survey of language choice in CS1 courses in Australasian and UK universities, revealing that the most popular teaching language is Java, followed by Python and C [39]. Interestingly, at the 2004 Symposium, Roberts called for educators to “take responsibility for breaking the cycle of rapid obsolescence [of teaching languages] by developing a stable and effective collection of Java-based teaching resources that will meet the needs of the computer science community” [37, p. 115]. Whether or not this call was met, and whether this was predictive of the prominence of Java reported by Simon et al. is beyond the scope of this paper, but it is interesting to note that the Roberts paper was published in 2004, near a peak in teaching language interest, and that in the current decade, interest has waned considerably, perhaps due to stability brought on by the popular use of Java and Python. Other factors that may have served to draw attention away from the language/paradigm debate recently include the 2004 adoption of Java for the APCS exam [37], which has remained unchanged since, and the evolution of ACM/IEEE model curricula— CC2001 categorized introductory languages by paradigm, while the CS2013 Fundamental Programming Concepts knowledge unit only identifies concepts common to all programming paradigms [23]