CSTA 2024 Exhibit Hall

The exhibit hall was impressive this year. I believe three are something like 80 exhibitors. Below is a snapshot of s few of them that caught my eye. The usual suspects are here of course. Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. You'd think Apple would be here if you'd never been to an educational technology conference. They are not here. I am surprised that Code.Org doesn't have a booth. Though of course you will see their team showing up in many sessions.

Items for physical computing are everywhere. I highlight a few here. One textbook company has a small booth. I wonder that that means. Thoughts?

I think I counted four universities promoting graduate programs for CS teachers. That gets a post of its own soon.

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  Amazon is here with a nice booth. They are promoting their Future Engineers program. There seem to be a lot of teachers here who are involved with that program.
• Google is talking about a number of programs they have. Code Next, CS First, and Gemini for Education

I'm not so impressed with the Microsoft booth. One expects more from one of the most valuable companies in the world. They have some good programs like MakeCode, Makecode Arcade (see the cool arcade machine they have to demo it?).

New is VS Code for Education which is a web based IDE and learning platform for Python and also web development. The TEALS program is sharing the booth as well.

• BirdBrain is here again. I think they have been at the conference for ever. Their Finch and other robots show up everywhere.
• Carnegie Mellon University is here taking about CMU CS Academy. One of the few university exhibits not promoting graduate courses for CS teachers.
• The Hidden Genius Project is trying to get young Black men into computing. This booth doesn’t seem to be getting enough attention but I feel like it should not be ignored. We can’t ignore young Black men.
• Koi’s Clan is one of two projects for very young students that I found interesting. I liked the little Kai Bot that is programmed with little graphic cards. Looks like fun and educational.
• Robotical has Marty the Robot who can be programmed with a graphical (without words) language for very young programmers. Why wait for kids to learn to read? My grandson loved robots long before he was reading.
• Lego Education had a large booth. A long time exhibitor they have some interesting stuff.