Choosing Our Computing Birthplace: VSCode vs Colab as GenEd IDEs

First impressions are important. The initial environment in which our computing students express themselves helps shape their foundational understanding of what computing is, what it's for , and who participates. This work distills experiences and insights from offering Comp1 and Comp2 1 with two different IDEs: Microsoft's VSCode and Google's Colab. We identify and describe several axes along which we compare our students' experience of these two. This effort has changed the way we offer Comp1, a degree requirement of all students at our institution, and Comp2, an optional follow-up course, required by some computationally-themed programs.