Still in St. Louis but we're now up to sessions and BOFs.

On Thursday, I attended two sponsor sessions on AI. One by GitHub and the other Google. In retrospect, they were both really the same session - on how their developers and other professionals are using AI. The big difference? Do you want your AI co-pilot flavored or Gemini/Antigravity?

The key points from the GitHub session was that when using AI, context is everything - it's easy to say "build me a minecraft code" because the term "minecraft code" brings all the context. On the other hand, asking AI to build something new is much more challenging and requires that the engineer actually has a strong tech / CS background.

Google had a similar point of view while explicitly saying that they expect their engineers to be able to leverage AI.

An interesting point is that both seemed to indicate that there would still be a big need for CS grads but that they'd have to be able to use AI. This is also in line with Titus Winters keynote. The trouble is, companies are seriously slowing down their hiring of entry level engineers.

Mixed messages here at best and in my opinion, the industry is going to be ina bind whe all those mid and upper level engineers retire and there won't be anyone to replace them.

I went to both of these sessions to get a better feel to of what the workplace expected so they were worthwhile if redundant. They also made clear that the companies are yet again talking out of both sides of their mouths - we need tech grads but we're not hiring them.

I lost a ton of respect for Google back when they laid off a huge number of employees not because they were losing money but because they were making less money than before. While their talk was interesting, it didn't do anything to improve my image of the company that used to have a motto of "don't be evil."

I also attended a session by the ACM Gen AI task force. In it, they demo'd 6 tools and techniques educators used in their classes. Fun and interesting session. You can check out the six demo'd tool along with a bunch of others here: https://acm-education-genai-task-force.github.io/approaches.html. Another winner of the session. Some interesting ideas being shared by our colleagues.

On Friday, I attended a session on Career Paths in Tech.

One talk was on how students who partake in extracurricular activities like hackathons are more likely to get internships. No real surprise but the author shared some interesting data. One aspect not covered that I was interested in though, was the challenges of student involvement in said activities at commuter schools.

The second talk was was on TicTok's role as a source for information on internships. The only interesting point here was that the info on TicTok was mostly on job listings and salary but not on specifics. I left feeling this was a negative result, that is, don't use TicTok, it isn't really helpful.

The third talk was on the "open source resume" by Code Day. Basically the author curated internships for students at institutions where companies don't normally recruit. They formed hiring agreements with the companies "if the students show x,y,z you'll interview them." Of course, this led to success. I say of course becuase I saw this at Hunter an CUNY in general - they have some great students but the "top" companies won't look at them. If you can get those company in the door, they'll find some great students.

Actually, I have more to say about this talk and Code Day's program but I'll save it for a post of its own.

The other talk was on visualizing pathways between CS courses and careers. The author had built a tool to visually show students the relationship between any given CS class in a school's sequence and what they'll need for the workforce.

It was an interesting talk and interesting tool but I wonder about how accurate the maps are. An algorithms course taught one way could prepare students incredibly well for industry but teach it another way, not so much. Still a great attempt to show students which courses are indeed valuable for any particular career path.

I also attended a talk on Pedagogy in Theory of Compution and Algorithms but was disappointed. The talk was fine but it was really just professors discussing generic teaching techniques - nothing specific to algo or theory.

Saturday consisted of two sessions.

One was on AI tools for middle schoolers. I enjoyed the session but have to do a deeper dive on the tools - are they just surface tools that have the kids playing with AI or are they exposing the "how?"

The final session was "It seemed like a good idea at the time." My favorite SIGCSE session. Presenters share an idea that they had for their classes that went horribly awry and well, hilarity ensues.

Great session with some great discussion at the end and a great forum where educators who aren't afraid of trying something new can share.

I can't do justice to the sessions in a blog post but if you go to SIGCSE in future years, I highly recommend this session.

Finally we have the BOFs - birds of a feather sessions - basically group discussions focussed on a topic.

I attended three.

First was What do you mean by "learn how to use AI." Great small group discussions. Even more so because I was in a group with Briana Morrison and Corey Bart - two friends that I had not been able to catch up with in a long time and two really sharp people who's opinions I value. There were also a bunch of other great people in my group. It was a treat for me to hear there thoughts and to share ideas.

Second was "Sticky Analogies" run by Dan Garcia among others. This was me rewarding myself. After going to sessions all day that I thought would be good for me and good for the few projects I'm working on, I decided to treat myself to a fun session. It was. A bunch of educators sharing analogies we used in classes.

The final BOF I attended was titled "All Scripture is Useful for Teaching: CS Education through a Christian Worldview."

Why would I, a Jewish Athiest with an extremely strong Jewish identity and, if I do say so myself, one who's pretty well versed in my religion as well as culture attend this session?

Two reasons. One positive and one negative.

The negative - I was put off by the way it was advertised. While most affinity groups - LGBTQ+, Black CS Educators, etc. have explicitly inclusive langauge in their session descriptions, that is "this session is for members of the LGBTQ+ community, allies, and those interested in learning more" or something similar, this session seemed to advertise as being only for Christians. That was offputting.

The positive reason was that I was interested in how someone who was a devout Christian of any denomination would approach CS education.

So, how did it go? Well, other than three things, the session wasn't specifically Christian. They organizers at the end mentioned that attendees, if they wanted could join a Christian CS Educators email list and also had Cross stickers that attendees could take for their badges if they wanted to easily identify each other. That was two and both were done in a non offensive way.

The third was when they described what the BOF was all about, they basically shared a list of questions that were mostly based off of Amy Ko's keynote two days prior. They said that they wanted to focus on the love and that most of what Ko spoke about was consistent with their worldview and wanted to focus on those parts. That little bit - mentioning that parts were inconsistent with their worldview was the third thing.

Take out those three remarks and you'd have a session of people talking about Amy Ko's keynote.

While the parts that were inconsistent with their worldview are things I believe in I respect that they were setting up the BOF to be inclusive and to focus on shared positive values.

The session then went to two small group sessions,

If I'm being honest, my first small group was a disappointment. We went around, as per instructions, each introducing ourselves. We were then supposed to get to the group questions - how do you show love for your students, your students for each other, and so on.

I introduced myself but then the next person spent the rest of the session basically explaining how I as an atheist am clearly wrong and even gave me a card at the end if I wanted to "have a conversation." Now, I could have taken the bait and argued since obviously I disagreed with his stance but that wasn't what I was there for.

It was a shame - nobody else (including me) got to share on the actual BOF topic.

My second subgroup was much better. I won't get into details but I left that group with a better understanding of how a devout Christian might approach aspects of CS education or education in general. I would have loved to explore more - were these teachers in religious schools or secular schools for example.

In any event, I really think that while there can be some value to this BOF, they really should have more inclusive language in the description.

So, that was SIGCSE 2026 for me.

It's now Tuesday evening. One week after my arrival in St. Louis and three days after the conference ended.

Terrific overall conference but at this point, I'm really hoping to get home soon,