Of course, the reason for being in Chattanooga was to attend the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) SIGCSE (Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education) Technical Symposium. That is probably the leading venue for the discussion of computer science education and attracted a large (1200 or so) crowd, from all over the world. I found the conference to be incredibly stimulating (I wondered if some of that had to do with immersing myself in teaching and learning issues after eight months of pure focus on my research!). In particular, there were some excellent panel discussions on various topics.
There was also an exhibition of various things of interest to the educational community, with especially good displays of textbooks from all the main publishers.
The SIGCSE community is a very warm bunch, and they went out of their way to make first-timers feel at home, including hosting a luncheon one day just for the first-timers, and a few committee members and "pioneers". At the lunch we informed that we were now officially adopted into the SIGCSE "family"! It was the 40'th SIGCSE Technical Symposium and so there was a cake-cutting ceremony one day, with everyone singing "Happy Birthday"!
It was interesting for me to see a number of authors of textbooks that I have used walking around "in the flesh".
Several of the sessions (and in fact, partially the "theme" of the whole conference) dealt with addressing the rather stagnant popularity of Computer Science as a field of study, particularly for female students, and there were some very good presentations on ways in which these issues might be addressed.
I left with a bunch of new ideas for teaching, a long list of textbooks to try to get out of various publishers, and a strong desire to try to get back again in the future. Next year in Milwaukee?!
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