CSTA 2026 Day One

CSTA 2026 didn’t start until noon today so I spent some time exploring. I wondered around the French Quarter. Bourbon street is not the same at 8AM as it is at 8PM for sure. But I found some good food and am snacking on a beignet as I write this up.

I snuck into the exhibit hall before it opened to take pictures of some of the booths. They’ll probably wind up in a blog post after the conference. While snooping around I was able to talk to one of the outstanding people in computer science in education -  Mitch Resnick from the MIT Media Lab.

I took a workshop with him about Scratch a number of years ago. He was nice enough to let me get this picture. Mitch is the person behind Scratch and Octostudio. I was able to talk to Mitch for a bit which was great. We talked about tools with low floors and high ceilings. We also talked about letting students get creative and have fun while learning..

Getting to talk to people is one of the best things about CSTA! I have connected with many friends and talked to a lot of new (to me) people. That’s been great

I went to a couple of sessions. I spend half of an hour with two physical computing . One of the Robolink Codrone and one on Micro Bits. Both are interesting. Drones are more expensive but I think they may attract some students that micro:bits might not. I was looking for a bit more innovation because I have seen both of these before. I’ve owned and used micro:bits as well. I think that these session were very good for people who are not as aware of these tools. I do think they are both pretty cool. If you have the money for them I can see them driving interest.

Next up for me was a session on MakeCode Tutorial Editor. This one was very good. It was hands on and the handout has an exceptional number of useful links. The Tutorial Editor allows a teacher to create their own tutorials for students to use to learn hands-on with MakeCode. We did some work in the session using AII tools to write the tutorials. I’m pretty sure I want to learn more about creating tutorials “by hand” though.

BTW MakeCode and its variants is a development environment that allows students to program with blocks, JavaScript, and Python for small arcade devices, micro:bits, and more. If you haven’t checked it out yet your really should.

The opening keynote was pretty good. I was mostly interested in Jake Baskin’s part of it though. He’s the Executive Director of CSTA and he talked about the state of the association. I need to think about some of it to see if there are places for me to get more involved. One highlight was his talking about a new definition of computer science. Always good for a discussion. Anyway, it is:

Computer science is the study and human-centered practice of using data, algorithms, and computing systems to solve problems, make discoveries, and express ideas.

Jake emphasized the term :human-centered.” I really like how he made the case that students need to learn computer science, perhaps even more so, in the age of artificial intelligence. I expect to hear more about the future of CS education from more people over the next several days.