Yesterday the conference started at around noon. I took the open hours in the morning to buy some pralines to take home.

Two sessions followed by a keynote and a reception.

The first session I attended was "Human and AI - Prompting for Critical Thinking and Exploration." The talk was fine but to be honest, it really wasn't about CS or teaching CS. Rather it was more about using AI as a support tool in general. In fact examples were given like "write a one page explanation of the causes of the American Revolution." The discussion was more about helping students in general in writing good prompts and interacting with AI effectively.

To do this, they provided their 4 point framework that they use with their students to help them in forming good prompts:

• verb - using verbs like compare or analyze or asking the AI to generate options.
• format - what should the output look like - a bullet list, a paragraph, a sonnet?
• voice - Who is the AI speaking as - a fifth grader? A doctor?
• context - as they say, context is everyting.

We looked at a weak prompt and a better one and explored their framework.

There was also a disussion of how, in classes they'd analyze a deep fake or an AI generated essay.

The session was fine, but as I said, I'd prefer if it were more related to CS. I understand as the CS teachers in their schools - and as middle school teachers, they're probably going to be tasked with making this work for all subject areas so this is just me being selfish.

The second session I attended was "Why teach with genAI" and it explored how one might use AI in an intro progrmmig course. The example was in a course similar to APCS-A.

The meat of the session consisted of a couple of execises. One had the participants ask AI to explain some code.

In the session, we were asked if the exercise was good or not. I thought it depended on intent. When asking the AI to explain some rudimentary Java code - think a basic class which uses a scanner, the AI will typically respond with a bunch of information that a beginner CS student won't be able to handle leaving them more confused. To me, then, if the intent was to use AI to enhance learning programming, it wasn't all that effective.

On the other hand, the intent was to explore the limits of using AI for help and to begin down the road to effectively using AI, it was great.

The second exercise dealt with debugging. The facilitators presented code that was something like this:

  boolean b = false;
  if (b = true);
    System.out.println("hello");
    System.out.println("world!");

I don't remember the specifics but something like that embedded in a small program with a main.

The goal was to use AI to identify all the errors in the code. We ran out of time, but I was hoping to first run the java compiler on the code to see the errors it generated so I could compare the AI output with the javac output to see if the AI in fact helped with debugging and understanding or not. Maybe I'll play with this when I get home.

Overall a fun session. I'm not clear that using AI in the ways shown through the examples are the right way or not but it was a worthwhile exploration.

Next up was the keynote and to be honest, it didn't do anything for me. It was given by two individuals, one gave their story and it was compelling - how they fell into tech and achieved success even without a college degree. The other? I'm still not sure what they were talking about. This was followed by a very abbreviated "fireside chat" where the MC asked both the speakers a couple of questions. It felt disjointed, short, and never really went anywhere.

The sessions were good even with my critiques but the keynote, a disappointment.

This was followed by two receptions - the main one in the exhibit hall and then the NY Chapter held one across the street.

Along with other random times when I ran into old friends and had a chance to catch up those were the highlights. For me, even though sessions and talks can be great, CSTA has always been more of a people conference for me.

Still to come - days 2 and 3, the exhibitors, and Devorah's knitting project.