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.

So, I stopped my previous post after my thoughts on the DEI talk. The actual post wasn't all that long, the reason I said for stopping the post but rather because writing that post was emotionally draining. Can I talk about that stuff? Will people interpret it the way I intended. Will people who I don't want to offend and don't think I'm offending, will they be offended? Will the people I want to offend not be offended (okay, just joking here).

Started out today in a session titled "Keep Calm and AI on." The panel was made up of CSTA Equity Fellows. It turned out that the session wasn't what I was looking for. According to the description the panel was supposed to cover "the promise and the challenges of various artificial intelligence tools, especially generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, Copilot, and Bard." Instead it was a general panel and discussion of the use of AI.

What, no day 1? Well, day one was all workshops followed by a keynote and a reception. I generally don't do workshops and got in too late for the keynote but I did hit the reception but not too much to write about there. This year the CSTA conference is in Las Vegas. I've never been to Vegas and there's not really much of a draw here for me. I'm not into gambling, the food, for a New Yorker is nothing special and while there are a number of shows that are unique to Vegas, again, as a New Yorker, it's not like I'm lacking for local entertainment options.

I love talking shop but I don't have the opportunity to do so as much now that I'm retired. So, when my former student Dino Beslic emailed me and asked if I wanted to be on his podcast, The Dino Podcast, I was both honored and excited. Dino was a student of mine in the early 2000s but we haven't been in touch for years. I reached out to his brother Denis, also a student of mine, in order to connect yet another student to him for a job referral.

Now that I'm not teaching CS every day, I find the desire to maybe write about some other things. I've still got a bunch of CS and education posts lined up, but for today, something different. I was out for my morning run a couple of days ago. I usually leave my apartment between 5:00 and 5:45, go to the Hudson River and run an out and back. It's still pretty quiet at that time.