Crowdsourced Blanket Time to wrap up the 2026 CSTA conference. Exhibit Hall It's interesting to see how the exhibit hall has evolved over the years. It's clearly larger than when I first started attending CSTA, around 10 years ago but the exhibitors have changed radically even since the first major increase in size. Gone are the big FANG vendors. Google always used to have a HUGE booth and at times other majors like Microsoft, GitHub, and Amazon as well.

So it turns out the third day of CSTA2026 was pretty light for me. There was a keynote and there was one session I thought might be a little interesting but that was it. Nothing else really spoke to me. Let's start with the keynote. Well, it wasn't really a keynote, it was really like a regular session but this way the conference organizers made sure a maximal number of attendees would go to it.

Tuesday started with two more sessions. First up was "Finding Balance with AI" led by fellow New Yorker Matt Carlberg. The session was about how Matt has worked to find the same balance many teachers are struggling with - teach the students to use generative AI effectively and safely while also keeping a handle on issues like cheating. The session was a mix of Matt sharing his practices and small group discussions.