Post CSTA 2026 Thoughts

CSTA 2026 was an excellent conference. No surprise there. CSTA is the biggest and best conference for K-12 computer science teachers. It’s one I recommend to anyone teaching CS. I am told that there were about 1,150 people in attendance. Not a record but a lot more than we had even a few years ago. Lots of younger teachers and a lot more diversity as well. These are all good things.

There were some surprises this week. One was who wasn’t there. Specifically, three large companies that had large booths in the exhibit hall at previous conferences had little to no presence and none in the exhibit hall. Microsoft, Amazon, and Google were not in the exhibit hall at all.

Microsoft had some people there and they made some presentations. I didn’t  see Amazon or Google. If they were there I missed it. I know that Google has dropped some of their programs completely. I don’t know about Amazon’s Future Engineer program. Of course all of those companies have let lots of staff go and cut all sorts of programs. Funding for CS education conferences was sometimes a tough sell at Microsoft even 10 years ago when I was working there. GitHub Classroom is going away and they were big at previous conferences. So there is that.

CodeAI was not present either. I understand they had a large presence at ISTE so maybe they spent their conference money there. I am sure they reached a lot of people but I have no insights on their goals. I am not sure what any of this means for the relationship between CodeAI and CSTA.

Attending CSTA as a retired teacher without a real connection to a school or company is different from attending as a teacher. That’s probably obvious. For one thing, it changes how I deal with exhibitors. The swag is really there for active teachers so I hesitate to help myself. At the same time, I do try to make myself useful to in-service teachers who can’t make it to the conference by sharing things that I learn there. So I do talk to exhibitors, ask questions, and take literature. It sometimes feels awkward to me. I wonder how the exhibitors feel.

I select sessions differently as well. I am not looking to prep for a specific course because I am not teaching. I am quite curious about a lot of things and learning for my personal benefit is important to me. So I attend sessions for various reasons i.e.. something strikes me as interesting. I also don’t lose value by skipping sessions for the hallway track. Although, to be honest, even when I was teaching I sometimes found the hallway track more useful than some sessions. Priorities!

The quality of sessions is pretty good. That is especially the case when teachers are talking about what they are doing in the classroom. Presentations from corporate people, whether they be big or small is a mixed bag. Most are very professional, very informative, and well prepared. They can be a bit sales like at times and lighter on concepts than I would like. They do tend to be very respectful of teachers and don’t try to drive the conference as much as it feels like ISTE is vender driven. I credit the conference committee for that. I’ve served  on the conference committee several times and the goal has always been about what teachers need rather than what industry wants to sell.

Circling back the the exhibit hall for a minute, I think that CSTA is a great opportunity for smaller ed tech companies to communicate with CS educators. Yes, ISTE has many more teachers but it’s also much more expensive and the target market for a CS ed product is a small percentage there. So bang for the buck I think CSTA wins every time. I talked to one exhibitor who was at ISTE this year and they thought the same thing.

It may be a good thing for smaller companies that the monster companies are staying away. A lot more conversations can happen at CSTA both because the big companies are not attracting people away with giveaways.

As always, I am leaving with a lot to think about. I hope to write up some of that thinking after it has settled. If you were at CSTA I would love to know what you took away from the conference as well.