This week I attended two conferences. The first was in Orlando, FL where I gave a one-hour talk and then jumped on a plane to Portland, OR where I spent the rest of the week working at the "Special Interest Group in Computer Science Education" conference. The conference was held at the Portand Convention Center. This is the top conference for computer science academics, and Microsoft is a major sponsor of the event. This is the booth that we had built for the event. Eighteen Microsoft researchers and academic managers like me attended the four day event, which ended this afternoon (Saturday, March 15th). I had a major role in planning Microsoft's engagement at the event, and I spent the entire time in the booth engaging conference attendees in conversations so that I could tell them about some of our academic offerings. This was my typical approach:
1. Hi, can I answer any questions?
2. Where are you from?
3. What classes do you teach?
Once they tell me what they teach, I can steer them in the direction of one of our booth experts and then its off to the next person. It was kind of like tracting; I found myself playing tracting games like "the next person wearing a blue coat that walks by I'll go talk to". It was pretty funny. If we saw someone that looked like they were purposely avoiding our booth because we were Microsoft (and therefore evil), I would purposely go strike up a conversation just to bug them. Some people I actually joked about using my Jedi mind powers to persuade them to adopt our technologies in their classroom.
2 comments:
I like the microsoft circular banner. Sweet.
Nice set-up. You can tell the difference in clientel (sp?) you were trying to impress (compared to those at the Air Museum).
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