CSTA 2024 trip report: mixed messages
Of all the places I might travel to in the U.S., the Las Vegas strip is near the bottom of my list. It has so few of any of the things I love — great transit, great coffee, human scale infrastructure, moderate weather, and a focus on wellness — and so many of the things I can’t stand—excess, heat, exploitation, extraction, deception, and second hand smoke inducing asthma attacks. But the wonderful K-12 CS teacher community is more than enough reason to go, and so when I heard it was in Vegas, I was more than happy to make the trip.
I flew out Monday morning to meet up with my cousin who had just moved to the Vegas suburbs and settle in. Arriving was a reminder of just how uncomfortable a place is. Not just the heat —though the heat is oppressive—but the tragically bad public infrastructure, the freezing interiors, and the cat calls everywhere I walked. Everything worked so hard to be fake, so hard to get my money. It was such a strange backdrop for a conference ostensibly focused on engaging all youth in great learning with and about computing. The conference center, though, was pleasantly calm, if a bit cavernous. There was lots of quiet space, a sufficient supply of cozy nooks for conversation. And so I came to think of it like a little oasis respite from the grueling surroundings.
This trip report will be shorter than my usual trip reports. That’s partly because I decided to practice “slow” conferencing, just investing in a few carefully curated events each day, with the rest of my time in conversation, having meals with colleagues, or solo exploring the broader city to escape the oppressive capitalist excess.
Tuesday: kickoff
I got breakfast with my wonderful postdoc Max Skorodinsky at Alexxa’s, and then for most of Tuesday, my time went to administrative meetings, a dissertation defense, and hallway reconnections. But I entered conference mode in the afternoon, attending the tail end of an AccessComputing sponsored accessibility advocates meeting, and then conference plenary around 5 pm, with the opening keynote. The plenary speakers did such a nice job of framing our work as collective effort, at laughing together. One nice touch was the conference having an official emcee, who did a great job bringing energy to the stage throughout the week. Of course, there were also the many icky ways that industry claimed space, including a ridiculous 10 minutes of sponsored messages from Google, trying to convince us that generative AI and Google deserves to control and shape the world.
We went from that awkward corporate message to one of the best aspects of CSTA, the equity fellows, which centers CS teachers’ focus on addressing equity gaps in K-12 CS. One of the fellows, Kayla (sp?) asked the audience to think about how everyone frames mistakes, including our own mistakes as teachers. She called for vulnerability, while also demonstrating vulnerability herself on stage.
We then switched to the keynote speaker, Conor Petersen, Technical Director of creative engineers at Meow Wolf. He leads the group of creative engineers there, at the intersection of art and STEM, and wanted to share some of the insights of the team. Many of the foundational principles is that art is social, requires radical inclusion, that tech is an art material, and that everyone has creativity. They focus on embedded systems, circuit design, real-time video, music, audio, and interactive systems. Most have backgrounds in both engineering and art, and most identified as lifelong learners. Most did not take computer science of any kind, and were self taught, or took a class in undergrad. Projects are truly interdisciplinary, with planning around creative goals and constraints, and success being entirely qualitative. Conor gave several examples of all of these processes — an alien ghost ship, a self playing gremlin symphony, and the many underlying hardware/software integrations necessary for the art to function. He ended with some core challenges: that technology exerts a force that pulls away from creation and toward consumption; and that technology should serve the humanities, rather than the other way around. Most of his team chose to work in art was to experience joy, agency, and fulfillment, and to center human values.
After, I got some BBQ with a group of educators and advocates in Oregon and Washington under a sea of artificially pumped mist.
Wednesday: Wordplay, keynote, and adventures
In the morning, I adventured to an egg sandwich shop down the street, and then finished preparing for my session with middle school teacher Adrienne Gifford to talk about Wordplay, our new platform in beta for interactive typography that centers accessibility and language inclusion. We had a nice group of about 35 teachers and teacher advocates, talked about core features of the platform, and then we played with it for about 45 minutes and brainstormed new features and captured bug reports. It was great to start building a larger community of early adopters committed to multilingual students with disabilities!
After, I had a gross salad with Richard Ladner and Briana Blaser to chat AccessComputing in a smoke filled Harrah’s food hall. I then decided to take a break for a grant meeting, finish submitting a journal article, advising one of my doctoral students, and then have many lovely hallway conversations with teachers, teacher leaders, and more. We all then went to the day two plenary, where Jake Baskin announced a $1 million gift from Google. Immediately after, equity fellow Michelle Pierce gave a flash talk on imposter syndrome, demonstrating immense vulnerability talking about the lack of support systems, the lack of affinity with teacher groups, and the slow way that recognition and success chipped away at her self doubt.
The day two keynote speaker was Gholdy Muhammad, a professor at the University of Illinois, Chicago. She talked about the many important aspects of learning that we often ignore in teaching in favor of skill development: joy, justice, history, genius, and the way that these aspects of learning can be traced back hundreds of years, including to Black literacy societies. She advocated for CS learning that does not abandon focus on skills, but refocuses skill learning on these other crucial dimensions of learning.
After the keynote, I went to a meetup with Puget Sound CSTA and Oregon CSTA members, then an award ceremony where teachers and students were recognized, and then met up with a group of a dozen queer folk to adventure to The Garage for some gay bar hijinks. Despite the smoke-induced asthma, I had a great time learning about everyone’s lives around the country, and sharing why I love my very special cat, Boomy.
Thursday: NSF PI meeting
Most of Thursday was an NSF PI meeting, which focused on NSF updates, new solicitations, data reporting requirements, and emerging topics for funding from the new CHIPS act and the executive order on AI. This included a short session I helped facilitate on physical computing, an area often overlooked by teachers. It was a wonky day of collective planning around congressional and foundation advocacy, and long term planning.
The PI meeting ended just before the day three CSTA plenary, where there was a panel on generative AI with Kip Glazer (a principal in Mountain View, Maggie Johnson (Global Head and VP, Google.org, Christy Crawford (Senior Director of Partnerships for NYC Department of Education), and Mehran Sahami (faculty at Stanford). The panel continued the whiplash of mixed messages throughout the conference: AI hype, AI skepticism, an AI apologies. My favorite comments were from Christy, who drew a sharp line against corporate product placement in classrooms and curriculum, asked critical questions about the need to understand generative AI’s increasingly obvious limitations for learning, and rejected the idea that school’s purpose is to train employees for tech companies.
After some tasty Chinese noodles with Max, I spent the rest of Thursday evening was the “after hours” event, held at the outdoor pool complex at Caesar’s. It was 100F outside, and miserable, but I had some great conversations in the shaded, misty cabana’s about epistemology, peer review, and anti-freedom of speech DEI bans around the country.
Friday: Escape and return
By Friday, I was pretty exhausted by the strip, so I adventured early to downtown Las Vegas to go to the beloved PublicUs cantina for a breakfast burrito and latte. It was already 90F by 8 am, so I was drenched after the 30 minute bus ride and 10 minute walk. But the cafe was a lovely escape, full of cozy seating, creative food, a great mix of Tame Impala and other alternative music from the past 20 years. It was so clear that this was the place to be for anyone in town desperate for a third place not warped by gambling, drinking, and exploitation. I caught up on email, journal editing, administrative crisis, and enjoyed a bright spot in the city’s creaking public transit.
I came back around noon for the closing plenary, which featured a nice accessibility update from my colleague Andreas Stefik (UNLV), a flash talk about neurodiversity, and then an inspiring panel with two Las Vegas students, Lucas Pinto and Christina Novey. Both talked about the crucial importance of great teachers, who they described as heroes who helped them embrace learning through failure and triumph. Both also emphasized the importance of persistence, and teachers offering a self-efficacy safety net as they struggled. Some talked about how high school CS wasn’t a great preparation for college though: expectations were much higher then they expected, with so many uncoordinated elements between high school and college curricula.
Reflection
I subtitled this trip report “mixed messages” because of the consistent alternation between truly equity centered messages and the constant message from corporate sponsors about jobs and AI. It’s not that these ideas are incompatible: there is nothing wrong with kids wanting and getting jobs, or anything inherently wrong with alerting us to new innovations. But the narrow focus on jobs, often at the expense of many other important ideas, and students at the margins of CS, means that in practice, they are in opposition. Full attention was Google and Amazon; the scant sessions focus on equity and justice hardly mentioned or highlighted. The way the conference alternated between a genuine focus on equity and a purchased focus on corporate philanthropy, without no comment on their tensions, felt icky.
Of course, I am certain of why the messages were mixed. The CSTA leadership truly does believe in equity, and I think understand what it can mean in practice. The equity fellows program is one good example of that, and I think the best thing CSTA does to advance it. But not-for-profits, CSTA included, depends on nominal fees from poorly compensated educators, and much larger gifts from big tech. That leaves little room for leverage against corporate influence. Can Jake Baskin, offered $1 million from Google, really ask that Google give the money without an obligation to shill? I’d like to think yes, or that Google would understand why unnamed gifts are so important to fulfilling not-for-profit missions. But I guess we’re not there yet, and so our shirts, fans, and stickers will continue to market big tech, instead of the much more important teacher work on the ground.
All that said, I loved the energy of this year’s conference. The teachers were electrified, the community is growing, and the representation from across the country is inspiring. Until next year in Cleveland!
