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.

Last week Devorah and I attended the Stuyvesant High School Alumni Association's annual fundraising gala. We were there as guests of the Alumni Association since, as retired teachers, gala tickets are generally out of our budget range. We had a great time. I spent time with a bunch of former students spanning the years, some current teachers I hadn't seen since I left Stuy, as well as new Stuy alums and current students.

Should we use MongoDB in High School? That's the question. Usually when I give a post such a title, I already have an opinion - it'll be a yes or no and if it's yes, I'll have a plan. Not this time. My gut tells me there's a place for it but I'm not sure where. Besides, that's not what this post is really about. At one point during SIGCSE 2023, I stopped by the MongoDB booth.

This morning, I read Arthur Goldstein's latest blog post. Arthur, is a relatively recently retired NYC public school teacher, a UFT (United Federation of Teachers) chapter leader, and a frequent critic of Michael Mulgrew, the current and long term UFT president. I'm a union guy through and through but I also, like Arthur, believe that UFT's leadership is neither pro-teacher nor pro-student but rather pro-themselves. It's a rather sad state of affairs.

Yesterday, I noticed a LinkedIn post by my friend Jonathan Gottfried of Major League Hacking about an MLH podcast, The State of Developer Education. The episode he shared caught my eye. It was titled "Do you Really Need a Degree for Tech?" Here's the YouTube link. It featured Lauren Schaeffer, Developer Advocate for Grammarly. I enjoyed listening to Jon and Lauren's conversation and recommend that you too take a listen, Lauren talked a bit about her journey and highlighted some happenings and practices along the way in school, IBM, MongoDB, and finally Grammarly.

Yesterday, Alfred Thompson posted on students knowing their development environments. Alfred's post was inspired by a related post by Eugene Wallingford. Eugene's post was about more than development environments and both his and Alfred's posts are worth a read. Being a tool wonk I thought I'd add my two cents. I've always been a tool wonk. Use the right tool for the job and if you need to buy one, don't cheap out - get the best value right tool.