Language wars in tech are common. Java vs C++, Functional vs OOP. If you're doing functional is your language functional enough? So to in CS Education. What's the best language for CS0? For CS1? Drag and Drop or text based? Functional? Object Oriented? Compiled? Interpreted? The battles rage on. One particular "war" that I've been a part of deals with the idea of a language's being authentic or real. I've been a part of this on two fronts.

I spent last week in San Francisco. I didn't leave my heart there but the entire trip was indeed heartwarming. I was there with members of the Stuyvesant Alumni Association for a StuyCS/Tech meetup. As one might imagine, many tech inclined graduates from any school end up in the Bay Area and Stuy is no exception. Sure, the majority of StuyCS grads stay in New York and help drive New York's tech sector but plenty decid to "go west.

I usually listen to podcasts on my morning run. For the past couple of weeks I've been listening to 99% Invisible's series on The Power Broker, Robert Caro's incredible biography of Robert Moses. Arguably the best book on New York City not to mention urban planning and politics. Amazing book. I read it a few years ago, well, actually listened to it at the same time as Natan - our own personal father son book club.

Last Thursday, I was back at Stuy. I was there along with members of the Alumni Association to host Stuy's first tech meetup of the season. I guess that's the first "official" project I'm working on since retirement. In the past, there had been various issues with Stuy's assorted alumni associations (yes, there were at one time three competing entities) but for the past few years they've been under what we can call "new management" - people I both like and trust so I'm happy to be working with them.

I haven't blogged for a few weeks. Part of the reason is that I haven't felt that I've had too much to say. That's in part because it's summer time and in part because I'm no longer teaching so that means no new experiences with students, no new stories, and, at least right now, no new CS education adventures. Part of it could also just be that I'm following the trend - fewer CS Ed bloggers blogging less frequently.

For years I've been one of the few people banging the "CS teachers must know CS" drum. There have been a few others out there but in terms of being vocal about it, we're in the minority. I get it. There are many teachers who volunteered to teach CS and are working hard to acquire the knowledge needed. There are also those who were voluntold who are trying just as hard.

How do we prepare teachers to teach AI to their students, teach their students to use AI effectively, and how to effectively use AI themselves. I was having this discussion with a friend this morning and I'm sure many educators have been having this and similar conversations over the past year or so. While the discussion around AI is different from the discussion of CS, after all an AI writing assistant can be used with zero understanding of AI and in any subject area but AI is a subset of CS and there are a number of parallels when thinking about preparing teachers in both cases.

CSTA was only a week ago but I've already been trotting out things learned there in conversations. Specifically, during the panel keynote, one panelist, while discussing the affects of AI cited a study. Two groups of programmers were tasked with writing some safe and secure code. One group used AI tools like copilot and chatGPT. The other didn't When all was said and done, the group that didn't use the AI tools produced more secure code.

Got home last night. Only delayed a couple of hours so we were much luckier than many friends who had to scramble and deal with canceled flights. It helped that we flew JetBlue, an airline not affected by the CrowdStrike issues and also because we were staying until Monday anyway so as to play tourist. What's left to cover. Let's start with the exhibition hall with all the vendors. There were the big companies - Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, curriculum provers like CodeHS and CMU (CS Academy), and lots of robots and robotics companies.

The conference ended this past Friday. After a couple of morning sessions I started to play tourist which included spending more time in the 100+ degree out doors. Fun stuff that I'll talk about later but left me too drained Friday and Saturday evening to continue my write ups. First up was another AI session "Unlocking AI: Teaching Artificial Intelligence in K12." Slides and other materials can be found here.