Once again, there were three sets of Birds of a Feather sessions. Two at the end of the day on Thursday but before the big reception and one partly over lunch on Friday.

Last year I enjoyed two but walked out o the third mid session. This year, I enjoyed two but just missed the third because I got caught up talking to an old friend.

Both of the sessions I enjoyed suffered from the usual BOF problems - since the sessions were well attended and time was short, it was tough to get deep discussions going and also keep the entire BOF together.

While both of the sessions I attended had to deal with these issues, the organizing teams of both really did a great job within the constraints of the session.

The first session was "Teaching Computing in Prison" run by Emma Hogan, Keith O'Hara, and Leo Porter. I already knew Emma and Keith but didn't realize they were running the session so it was nice to chat with them prior to the BOF starting.

Now, I've never taught in prison. The closest was in my very first class of my very first year of teaching. I taught a remedial math class and a good portion of the students in that class were recently out of prison and some would be soon to go in. I was also a little familiar with a coding bootcamp type effort but I think that focused on people recently released and not those actually still incarcerated.

The BOF was fascinating. It's amazing the restrictions both instructors in prison as well as the students have to work under. Nothing connected to the internet, frequent interruptions (alarms), students coming and going and that's the easy stuff. In many cases, can't even run their actual code - it has to be printed out and submitted to the instructor who can then, if they chose to and have the time, they can run the code (after typing it in) and test it and give feedback.

Other interesting tidbits, though I could be misremembering some of this - neither the students nor the instructors decides who gets into the class. It's assigned by some third party (the prison administration???). The prisoners in the program are all part of the same major and it isn't CS.

The whole thing was fascinating. I'm interested in learning more. A big question I have is what's the point of the CS course or the major for that matter? Pure academic exploration? It seems a poor design for job prospects although that's something that Keith brought up - the push and pull between what he taught which was purely academic, being from a small liberal arts college and the prison's desire for a more jobs oriented program.

The other BOF I attended and loved was titled "Towards a Computer Science Curriculum “Microkernel" and raised the questions of if there's a common core that could/should be taught in CS. This was very much related to some of the themes that came up during Friday's keynote and is something I've thought long and hard about for years.

Many similar themes as the keynote but we talked about them in small groups - do we need all the courses that we teach? Do we need to teach as much about sorting as we do? What's the point of teaching any particular topic?

I don't have too much to say in terms of specifics, but I'm glad this conversation is happening and happening in public. It's so hard to move institutions and even when you can steer the ship it can take years or even longer. At Hunter, there were some people who wanted to reform the CS major but all it took was a couple of "we always did it this way" people to sink any innovation.

Still, with the conversation happening maybe some places will have success.

So, those were the keynotes. Stay tuned for more on a bunch of other types of sessions.