The article presented here takes a step back from 25 years of teaching in schools of architecture to analyze the challenges and issues related to digital tools. Two schools are compared, the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture in Nantes, France and the FAMU in Tallahassee, USA.The precise analysis of the courses and the inventory of the tools used shows distinctly two modes of operation from which we forge two concepts: one, which we call " legacy " makes no particular distinction between an analog or digital practice and tends to privilege analog tools. The other, which we call "emergence" is based on the almost exclusive use of digital tools by proposing a cybernetic thinking