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. That said, there are some things I'll enjoy taking in while I'm here - the spectacle of everything, the Mob museum, Hoover Dam, and Red Rock Canyon in particular.

To be honest, though, I really don't get putting a teacher conference here. Everything is so expensive. The rooms were reasonable (even with the resort fee) but everything is nickle and dime. The room only comes with 2 WIFI connections so if you're 2 teachers sharing a room and each need a phone and computer on WIFI, that's $30 extra a day. Then you've got food. A medium coffee in the morning is going to set you back $7 or $8 and today lunch cost me around $25 for a mediocre sandwich and a cannoli - around $10 more than I'd pay in NYC which is not a cheap town.

So, I don't get the location but I still really enjoyed the opening reception, had a blast today as well and am a big fan of the CSTA conference.

To start out the day I sat in on John Dutton's session "Creating a toolkit for all CS learners." I was hoping to avoid an AI talk since I knew I'd get plenty of those later on but I really wasn't sure where this session would lead. It turns out I didn't avoid an AI talk but that was okay.

The first half of John's talk was on how he set up his class culture - something that's both very important and also frequently neglected. He spoke about empowering the class by asking them how they would like this class to be different than others they've had - it reminded me of my friend and former student Davin, who, whenever he starts a new company spends time with the founding team discussing what they did and didn't like about the culture of their past companies and then uses their combined experiences to make a strong positive culture for their new venture. John' talks about student "jobs" in the class and more. I ran into John at lunch later and we chatted a bit. I felt that our thoughts are pretty aligned on class culture being really important but also confirmed my suspicion that he only had around 14 kids per class which affords him more opportunities to set a positive culture than a teacher of say 34 per class in a crowded room. This is not to take away anything from his work as he's aware of this advantage and appreciates it.

John also talked about some CS teaching techniques. Well, they're not really CS specific techniques but CS teachers frequently use them - rubber duck debugging, asking classmates before asking the teacher and a few other strategies. Then, the main event, a template to set up an assignment that then used a script that used AI to take the data in the form and create multiple, differentiated versions of the lesson.

To be honest, there wasn't a lot in this session for me given that I'm not teaching right now but for a new CS teacher, I could see a lot of value. I think I thought there would be more actual CS in the presentation but that's neither here nor there. John shared this link with materials which includes along with his lesson template, lists of frameworks and other resources, and a whole lot more. If you're relatively new to teaching CS I'd strongly recommend you click on the link and check out everything provided.

Next up was a teacher certification talk given by three educators fro Gwinnett County Georgia. The talk covered the state of things in Georgia and what they've been doing. I learned that in Georgia, one has to have certification (or rather, an endorsement) to teach CS. This can be earned either by taking an exam or by earning an endorsement through an approved program. This group from Gwinnett designed a one year and also acquired funding to cover costs. I like a lot of what they're trying to do. The Gwinnett team developed a one year boot camp for current teachers and area trying to emphasize a community model along with mentorship. Philosophically, at least from the pedagogy and implementation side, their program sounds similar to what I designed at Hunter in New York. My concern has to do with the depth of CS knowledge they're covering. This isn't necessarily the fault of the Gwinnett team though, it appears this is what Georgia's requiring and if they require content far deeper than Georgia requires, the state might not approve of their program and teachers might not attend. Their program maxes out at APCS-P which to me, is way to elementary for a certified High School CS teacher. Those teachers need, in my opinion, at least a bit beyond APCS-A along with a good deal of breadth.

It was interesting to hear about what was going on in another state and while it sounds like Gwinnett County Schools are doing some pretty good work within the framework and constraints their state provides, I fear that by setting the CS bar so low, Georgia is shortchanging their students.

After lunch, I attended John Chapin's session on "Machine Learning Made (more) simple." I loved this session. John's material is all here. John described and walked us through how he teachers linear regression. His goal was to teach us (his students) how it works rather than just use a library or black box toolkit. I'm 100% behind this. Now, it is true that John's at a public magnet school with high achieving students just like I was at Stuyvesant and what he presented, out of the box, probably can't be implemented in a typical school but the approach and attitude certainly can and should.

John motivated the problem by asking what data would be helpful in predicting home prices, he then had his class (us) work for a time in groups to try to figure out relationships and even models to go from the data to something to predict prices. He then stepped us through unplugged hands on exercises that led us to and through gradient descent. This in turn led to code and in the end, the class had both written and understood a key machine learning technique.

Great session and I hope the attendees take this approach in some of their CS classes. As I said, I don't think this specific assignment will go over well as is with all populations but I think the approach can. I've successfully done similar things both my AP classes and in pre AP programming classes like when I cover writing a Caesar Cipher decryption program. The difference is that in the Linear Regression lesson the class is learning a specific machine learning technique that requires a certain level of mathematical sophistication to really "get" while in my case, we do a simpler problem that uses many similar techniques but with simpler mathematics and simpler application. My problem sets the stage for that ML lesson a couple of years later. I also do something similar in my "who played Spiderman" unit.

Great session. I was concerned that all of the AI sessions - and there are many - will all be, taking out policy sessions about using existing tools and libraries and not result in students really understand what's going on under the hood. This talk allayed that concern.

I just hit the posters and exhibits for the last sessions and then attended the closing keynote delivered by Gholdy Muhammid - "Cultivating Genius and Joy in Education Through Culturally and Historically Responsive Pedagogies." I thoroughly enjoyed the talk. Muhammid is an engaging, entertaining and funny speaker. My takeaway was that our teaching should be evaluated by the Joy in the classroom and the pursuit of knowledge as opposed to just the standards based evaluation currently used which just measures facts and only facts. Note that I say "just the standards…" and not instead of them. To her credit Ms. Muhammid noted that standards - the specifics, the skills, the facts are important as well. This is critical. One of my annoyances at a lot of the K12 CS movement is that there's frequently only emphasis on the joy and they ignore the facts that at the end of the day the teacher must know some, I don't know, actual CS and that students must learn it as well.

That said, Ms. Muhammid's talk was really all about the type of education reform we really need in our schools. I had a couple of quibbles but it was a great talk. If CSTA releases a video, take the time to watch it.

The day ended with Devorah, who played tourist by day, and I went for drinks and some light dinner with the New York contingent at the conference. A highlight was getting together with four students from my CS certification program at Hunter including Marisa - a CSTA Equity Fellow and incoming CSTA-NYC board member, Jessica and Josh - both CSTA-NYC board members, and Victoria - the first person in New York State to earn a Masters in CS Education from an approved certification program and earn the associated license. So proud to have been privileged to work with all four of them.