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.

No more.

Big companies may or may not still be sponsoring but no more big booths with fancy swag.

Also gone are book vendors, at least for the most part but that somewhat makes sense.

What was there this year? Lots of robots and hardware. My friend and fellow CS Education blogger Alfred Thompson wrote about that here. They were the largest presence. Vex, the Raspberry Pi foundation, Lego and many more. There were also a handful of online programming environments. Some organizations - the college board, and Hello World CS.

Some intresting booths included a booth repping Earsketc and a group integrating STEM education and dance.

Overall a nice mix though as a retired teacher, nothing really userful to me.

I've said it before. For me, CSTA has been more of a person conference than a session conference. This year was no exception but things have changed. I used to know many more attendees than I do now. Sure, I still know some people but many friends - both teachers and teaching adjacent have left CS Ed. If I continue attending these things, I'll have to overcome my social awkwardness and force myself to meet new people.

Still, was delighted to see a number of friends including a bunch of people I never expected there.

I'm guessing that new teachers probably got a lot from the sessions but I think even for them, the personal connections they can make at CSTA - to educators from different parts of the country can be the true gold at the conference.

A highlight for me, even though I really didn't do anything was that my wife Devorah was able to relaunch her Blanket Statement project. Basically, crowdourcing a hand made blanket to be donated to a child in need.

She ran this project pre-covid when the GitHub booth gave us space.

At CSTA2025, I was talking to Charlie Meyer one of the founders of Pickcode. I had gotten to know Charlie and Pickcode a year or so prior. Pickcode is a rather nice educational programming IDE and I found Charlie to be very responsive to teachers so I became a fan.

Long story short, Charlie and his co-founder Colin offered up space for Devorah to run the project again.

You can read a bit more about how Devorah's project being hosted at Pickcode went on the Pickcode blog here but it was a great success. Throughout the conference, Devorah distributed and collected knitting and crocheting supplies and taught conference goers how to use them.

It was pretty cool to see at this advanced, tech age, STEM conference, people walking around with knitting needles and crochet hooks.

By the end of the conference, enough squares had been made to construct two blankets both of which will be donated soon.

Through the genorocity of our friends at Pickcode and efforts of friends like Laurent Bricker and others, Blanket Statement was a great success and hopefully it can be recreated at other conferences.

So that was CSTA 2026 for me. Next CS conference will be the NY State CSTA conference in November.