I saw three keynotes, I also went to three Birds of a Feather sessions (BOFS). Three was possible as SIGCSE added a third "flock" this year. I didn't take notes since BOFS should be pretty interactive so I won't be able to give too much in terms of content summaries bu hopefully I'll be able to convey the gist of what went on.

Two of the BOFS I attended were good, the third was, if I'm to be honest, pretty awful.

Here's the rundown.

The first session I attended was "Creating University Teacher Training Programs." I figured I pretty much had to attend this one.

Overall, this was a good session but it did suffer from a couple of insurmountable problems that I think all the BOF sessions had. First, there were a lot of participants, second there just wasn't enough time. This meant that we just didn't have that much time to get into meaningful discussions. We were able to share some basic facts about our state's certification processes but we couldn't get much further.

Most of the BOFS I've attended at SIGCSE follow the same basic format. The session leaders say a few things, the room splits into groups of varying sizes, the leaders give questions, the groups discuss. Between questions, there's usually a share out. This takes a lot of time. It might be worth it if SIGCSE made one flock of double length rather than two flocks or if organizers split their sessions into smaller groups and just let them have at it without the intermittent reconvening.

In any event, this session covered the basics and was worthwhile but I would have liked to have been able to talk about actual program designs with the other session attendees.

The second BOF I attended was titled:

K-12 CS Teacher Education: What are we teaching and to whom? How do we know we are moving the needle?

with a sub heading that included:

…it is imperative that the CS education community understand the myriad ways in which CS teacher education is enacted and begin developing best practices for the field.

I was hoping that this would be a dive into what and how different programs were teaching. I couldn't have been more wrong. The session was run by two people but only one really facilitated. I won't go into details but I will say that the individual who actually ran the session displayed poor teaching practices in working to direct the groups in specific ways rather than facilitating an open discussion.

I left midway through and had a much more valuable hallway track discussion.

My third BOF was the following day. It was titled "Computer Education and Capitalism." Like the first BOF I described, this was a good session but fell short on time. The organizers framed the discussion but as "computer education and capitalism" can mean many things, they gave groups freedom to explore as each group wanted to. This meant we could talk about education for jobs vs pure education, capitalist influences on curricula, teacher prep, and how teachers have to teach or pretty much anything else. Overall strong session. I think most people, including myself left with a new wrinkle in our thinking.

So that's it for today. Two strong BOFS and one bad one. I think it might be cool if there were a way for each BOF to summarize the discussion to share back to attendees. Sometimes it feels like we come together in a room, have a discussion with new friends and then it's all lost in the ether. Still worthwhile but maybe they could be something more.