Computer Science Teacher

No Room in the Inn–I Mean Schedule

2012-01-31T14:29:00.001-05:00

I spent yesterday at Stevens Institute of Technology, an outstanding university across the river from New York City. The occasion was a high school computer science workshop for faculty and students. While the students were getting demonstrations on some of the cool technology that Stevens faculty and students are working on the high school teachers were involved with a panel discussion. I was on the panel along with Jan Cuny (NSF), Bob Slater (Alice/CMU) and Tara Canobbio (Google). We started of with some great discussion of pedagogy. Don gave us a preview of Alice 3.1 Alice 3.1 looks amazing though I suggested they need an interface with Kinect so that avatars could follow people’s movements in the real world and act on them in the virtual world. Now wouldn’t THAT be cool? I of course brought up the usual – Kodu, XNA game development and Windows Phone development. There continues to be a lot of interest in game development and mobile/smart phone development to attract students and we do have a lot of free curriculum resources for that. But after a while a bigger worry became the topic of discussion – there is too little room for computer science in the curriculum.

This is a complicated issue (I wrote some about it just last week at We Need A Wider Conversation on CS Education) but basically these are some of the issues:

Students have room for fewer and fewer electives because of increased mandates and CS is mostly an elective
Most states (42 of 50 including New Jersey) do not allow computer science to count as either a math or science so may not help towards graduation requirements
Students will often not take “hard” electives for fear of hurting their GPAs
Certification for computer science educators is a mess – I could write a lot about that but is should be sufficient to say that lack of a clear certification for CS teachers contributes to the problem

Teachers, for the most part, feel helpless to fix these issues. There are large and powerful organizations for teachers of subjects like math and even art and music. These groups have lobbied hard to get their subjects either increased inclusion as graduation requirements. The CS community has not been as successful. Now there are efforts to change this. The CSTA (PLEASE if you are a CS teacher join and get active) has worked diligently at the national level and through local chapters at the state level to lobby for more CS education. Getting CS Education Week though Congress was a big win; a good step in the right direction. But without computer science being in the common core we’re still playing come from behind. Computing in the Core, a partnership between professional agencies and some in industry (Microsoft is active) is working towards this goal. But ultimately education much like politics is local in the US. That means that decisions are seldom make at the national level (no matter how much some people which it were different). Decisions are made at the state and local level.

Some schools have decided on their own to make computer science a requirement. Some, Los Angeles for one, have at least worked hard to make it more available starting with grade 9 in order to give more students the opportunity to learn what CS is all about.

In the US we are not turning out enough of the high quality computer science professionals that we need. These are great, world changing jobs but we are cutting back – in many cases actively and deliberately for cost cutting reasons – on the education of the very people we need most to turn the economy around. Some special purpose schools (Software Engineering High School) are great as far as they go. In the long run though we owe it to all children to have the opportunity to be exposed to a real, engaging, and valuable computer science course.

Interesting links 11 December 2011

2011-12-11T19:34:00.001-05:00

Last week I posted a list of some of the great computer science related blogs I read on a regular basis (Computer Science Education Blog Roll) Week after week these people share ideas and thoughts and tools that really make a difference in the world. This week, as usual, I list some of the best posts from those very special people. But first Andrew Parsons reminds me that Just One More Week To Enter The Rock Paper Azure Fall Sweepstakes! This is an opportunity for programming hotshots to learn a little about writing applications for the cloud and have a go at writing some artificial intelligence code as well.

I really love Ben Chun’s idea of spending the first 5 minutes of class writing a method of the day. Take a look at his blog post Question of the Day and find the link to the first 10 questions he used with his students. For C#, Visual Basic and F# you could probably do something like this fairly easily with Pex 4 Fun and save some grading time.

I also enjoyed this blog post by Johnny Kissko ( @johnnyeducation) about Kinecting the Gaps in Education. Well worth the read.

In other news, the Alice team (alice.org) out of Carnegie Mellon University has a new Alice Facebook page to help build community.

Ed Donahue ( @creepyed) tweeted about A beginners guide to developing for Windows Phone . Download the guide (the link is to a PDF) and get started!

Computer Science in Top Ten Degrees That Pay Back: In Computer Science As more and more students (and their parents) start to take the economic viability of various degrees and majors it is nice to see computer science near the top of the list.

The student focused Microsoft home page at microsoft.com/student/ has been completely updated and redone. Well worth checking out and sending students you know to visit.

Did you notice that the new Kinect for Windows SDK Beta 2 is now available for download?

last but far from least, Tony Franklin (@TeachTec) has but the most amazing list of Tools for Schools at teachtec.cloudapp.net. This site lists over 100 free Microsoft Education resources that you can use. Oh and perhaps FREE works for you? Check it out and pass it along to any other teachers you may know.

Why I’m Still Excited about Computer Science

2011-12-08T11:39:00.001-05:00

It’s computer science education week and that has me thinking about what I’d like to tell students about computer science. So I decided to record something on the subject.

The short version is that 38 years after the life changing experience that writing my first computer program was I am more excited about computer science than I was then. And that is saying something. This is my first experience trying to do a video cast but since a lot of students don’t read this seemed like a good time and a good topic to try it out. I hope you like it.

Some links that I talk about for reference:

http://www.dreamspark.com for free software for students.
http://www.imaginecup.com for the international student development contests that Microsoft runs annually.
http://www.kinectforwindows.org for the free Kinect SDK for Kinect applications on Windows

Interesting Links 13 November 2011

2011-11-13T14:43:00.001-05:00

I spent a lot of time watching the Twitter feed and reading blog posts about the Microsoft Global Forum last week. And some watching the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing as well. A good number of this week’s links are to posts related to the Global Forum. Let’s start with post event reflections from three attendees who were there in different roles.

Lee Kolbert (@TeachAKidd) was one of the judges: What's in Your Heart? My Reflections as a Judge From The Microsoft Global Forum
Johnny Kissko (@johnnyeducation) is a teacher who represented the US at the Global Forum. Reflections from Microsoft’s Partners in Learning Global Forum
Doug Peterson (@dougpete ) was there as a blogger/reporter My Takeaways from the Partners in Learning Global Summit

Two more teacher reflections

Doug Peterson had a series of blog posts from the Global Forum and between his tweets and posts I feel like I had a good idea (in a very small way) of what was going on. Here’s a bit of the day by day as Doug experienced it.

Here is the list of the 2011 Global Innovative Educator Award winners! If you are interested in participating in 2012 follow the Microsoft Partners in Learning Facebook page. A few more news pieces from the Global Forum

US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan spoke to the group and throws a fish! Also Microsoft announces partnerships to inspire and support educators around the world:

Kinect was big at the Global Forum and coincidentally there is a new home page for Kinect for Windows kinectforwindows.org

From Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing Ed Donahue (@creepyed) send out an invitation to heck out the flickr group, This is what a computer scientist looks like, A great collection of women of all types who are involved in computer science. Chances are good that girls you know will see imagines of women like them.

Also at GHC, Ashley Myers (@OrganizeFISH) Tweeted this interesting tidbit “AP Calc and AP Stats have almost 50/50 female/male. AP CS ~16% female. ” Make you think doesn’t it?

Launching the 2nd Annual CSEdWeek Ideas for colleges from Mark Guzdial (@guzdial) that apply to many businesses as well.

Bob Familiar (@BobFamiliar) blogs about a new program for app developers. [Your App Here] offers opportunity to have your Windows Phone app featured

Interesting Links 7 November 2011

2011-11-02T07:23:00.000-04:00

Andrew Parsons has written an amazingly complete blog post about Create and publish your own Tower Defense game for Windows Phone 7. It you want one place to send a student for a “how to” this is the place. For high school students the DreamSpark piece is a little different in that they should get an access code from a faculty member at their school. That is a minor detail though and shouldn’t cause anyone any real issue.

I found a couple of new (to me at least) computer science teacher blogs last week:

Super Computer Science by Rebecca Dovi
CS Principles @ North by Deepa Muralidhar - This is a blog following the journey of teaching a CS Principles pilot. Their curriculum is growing at http://hcps.us/phhs/comsci/cs_principles.htm

Have you seen the Kinect Effect video? Or read about how ‘Kinect Effect’ Magic Pushes Beyond the Living Room. It’s pretty cool and full of ideas and potential. last week Vice President for Education at Microsoft, Anthony Salcito, talked about The Kinect Effect in Education. What are some of your ideas?

For more on Kinect, it’s been out a year now, you may want to see this article on Silicon Valley’s Kinect Contributions.

I’d like to point out a few great blog posts by others in the last week or so.

Computer Science needs good bait by Garth Flint
Stats, data, and answers, as to why there are so few women in technology fields. by @RachelAppel
The Role of Academic Blogging by Amy Bruckman
High School CS Teachers as the New Computing Professionals on the blog at @blogCACM written by Mark Guzdial
Resources and Content from our Phone Camps by Kenny Spade

One last interesting article. How one woman technologist single-handedly created thousands of jobs article and video interview on| Venture Beat. Very cool way that one person used the power of the Internet to solve literally thousands of small problems for lots and lots of people

Writing My ISTE Keynote

2011-11-01T21:02:00.001-04:00

I had mail today saying that ISTE was looking for nominations to present a keynote in San Diego this summer. They asked “could it be you?” Well unlikely it would be me but I asked myself “what would I say if I was asked to give the keynote at ISTE?”

So I sat in my hot tub for a half an hour and now have a basic outline ready. I am thinking that I will write it up over time and post in on my blog. Either this one or that one. Why not?

The next thing I thought is that everyone in education should write their own ISTE Keynote and publish it online. If you don’t have a blog I’d be willing to post some of them here. But really, isn’t it time you started your own blog?

Interesting Links Post 31 October 2011

2011-10-30T19:35:00.001-04:00

Busy week last week. You may have read about my two days in Atlantic City (Kinect-ing at the NJSBA Annual Workshop). Real work. Enjoyable work but none the less it was work. Friday I visited a career technical high school, Upper Cape Cod Tech, and had a wonderful visit with students and faculty alike. And then from Saturday night until Sunday night I got the experience the wonder of life without power. Yes we did have a big snow storm in New Hampshire and the trees and power lines took a beating. It was quite a reminder of how dependent we are on electricity these days. But we’re nice and warm and have Internet back now so all is right with the world. I was afraid I would have to run the engine in my car to power my laptop and get me an Internet feed from somewhat to do this post but I’m getting to do it from the comfort of my home after all. Here now some links that I hope will be useful.

People often ask me what it is like to work at Microsoft. I tell them it is pretty great. Last week Great Place to Work® Unveils World's Best Multinational Workplaces and Microsoft tops the list. This list is for companies with a global foot print but Microsoft regularly makes local lists in numerous countries, states, and local geographies. Most of the people who work at Microsoft love it.

Please welcome Doug Bergman, Computer Science teacher and innovative educator, to Twitter @dougbergmanUSA. Visit his blog at http://innovativeteacher.org/ Read about how Doug is excited to represent the US at the Global Innovator Forum Nov 7-11 in Washington DC as well.

Congratulations to Mitchel Resnick - awarded the McGraw Prize in Education for Scratch

The new Windows Phone Blue Book now available from Rom Miles (@robmiles) Learn the latest for creating Windows Phone Apps from someone who really knows how to teach.

Meet the Microsoft Tech Student of the month for October – Shashank Srinivas

Did you see the news that once again a technology company is promoting a woman to the top spot? Last week I read that IBM tapped its first woman CEO to succeed current CEO Palmisano. The opportunities for women in technology are there all the way up to the top.

The Teacher Tech blog (Twitter @TeachTec) continues with there TeachTecTip series with Add sounds, movies and animation to your PPT (this post includes a How-to video & step-by-step instructions.)

Are you ready for Computer Science Education week? If not read about some Activities for CS Education week on the CSTA blog.

Have you heard about the upcoming HTML5 Game Camp Series? Coming soon to Boston on 11/17, plus Atlanta, NYC, and Penn State soon after.

NEW: Streaming videos of CS&IT 2011 Presentations! Did you miss the SC & IT conference in New York City this past summer? Good news then. The presentations were recorded and videos are now available. Catch them now!

Have you seen some of the latest things from coding4fun? Check out Digesting Kinect. Using the Kinect to teach the Digestive System

Interesting Links 17 October 2011

2011-10-16T22:39:00.001-04:00

I spent two days are a Windows Phone event last week. One of several I posted date for at Your Chance to Learn Windows Phone Development for Free There are a lot more of them up and down the east coast. We had a few faculty members and students at this one and I think they all learned a lot. I know I did.

The Teacher Tech blog had an interesting featuring the work of Kelli Etheredge @ketheredge who I I met at the US Innovative Education Forum this summer. Read about it at Putting your students in the court room–mock trial, of course

Know a tech-savvy girl? Encourage her to apply for the NCWIT Award for Aspirations in Computing! I wrote about this earlier at 2011 NCWIT Award for Aspirations in Computing. This is a really great program to bring some positive attention and recognition of girls who are interested in careers in technology.

One of the ways Microsoft is using software to make things better is by Making Buildings Energy-Smart at Microsoft. Ideas like this not only reduce energy consumption but make everything more efficient. This is just one way that software is making a difference in solving the worlds problems. For students the Imagine Cup is an opportunity to come up with their own ideas for using software to make the world a better place.

Doug Bergman writes about his experience with the World Series of Innovation on his blog. I wrote about this event earlier at NFTE World Series of Innovation

I don’t know if you saw the very sad news that Dennis Ritchie (1941-2011), creator of the "C" language and co-creator of Unix, passed away last week. A lot of good things came from his work over the years. BTW the Windows Phone workshops I attended were in the heart of Cambridge’s Kendall Square where there is recognition of Steve Jobs, another pioneer we lost recently. People have been leaving various things there to honor his memory. I took a picture.

When Fish Fly

2011-09-27T11:36:00.001-04:00

How excited am I about the Partners in Learning Global Forum? I’m seriously thinking of taking vacation days and paying my own way to Washington DC to see if I can “crash” it. I had a great time and learned a lot judging the US event (Innovative Education Forum–Judging Day) this summer. I met some great teachers doing a whole lot if interesting things. One of the special things about this year’s event is that the attendees were grouped into teams and asked to create a “learning excursion activity.” The team that created the best activity as judged by their peers would be the “tenth team” that the US sent to the Global Event. Well the winner was announced this week at Flying Fish & Kinect help lead the final U.S. team to the Partners in Learning Global Forum.

The winning team is made up of:

Doug Bergman, computer science, Porter-Gaud High School, South Carolina
Johnny Kissko, math, Frenship High School, Texas
Margaret Noble, media arts, High Tech High, California
Donna Thomas, computer science, Sherwood High School, Maryland
Lou Zulli Jr., computer science, Lakewood High School, Florida

Some of those names will be familiar to regular readers of this blog. For example Doug and Lou have been congratulated before for their performance at the US IEF event. (Congratulations Louis Zulli Jr. and Doug Bergman) Johnny Kissko and his KinectEducation site have been linked to several times as well. Margaret Noble made a trip to a United Nations conference on Education in the Middle East that she documented at Guest post: A reflection by a U.S. educator visiting Jordan “…a United Nations conference for education” and which I linked to.

Their project is really interesting and I encourage you to read all about it at Flying Fish & Kinect help lead the final U.S. team to the Partners in Learning Global Forum. But in brief,

The intent of “When Fish Fly” is for students to work in a collaborative design team to create an Xbox Kinect game (using the Kinect SDK among other tools) that replicates the sights, sounds and “sense of place” of this iconic venue within the Pike Place Market (you all have likely seen or heard of the Pike Place Fish Co., it’s the fish market where they throw whole fish when you place an order!). Of course not all students will have a chance to visit this market so the lesson was extended to be applied to any noted venue or location in your community.

Lou Zulli is having his CS students implement the project for real. I look forward to haring more about it in the very near future.

On a separate, but related note on Kinect : On Friday we released new lesson ideas and activities for use in the classroom with Kinect. These resources, aligned to Common Core Standards, were created by a team of educators (including one member from this team – thanks Johnny!). Check out the site and let us know what else you need to bring together gaming and learning in the classroom.

Interesting Links 20 September 2011

2011-09-20T05:36:00.000-04:00

I really had to post the information about the new Game development course yesterday (Game Development with XNA Curriculum–Semester Course). I’m pretty excited about that material. Teacher developed and tested and aligned to standards. And it is game development. How cool is that? Closely related to that the opening of the new Imagine Cup US website (Blogged at Imagine Cup 2012–Changing The World For The Better last week). It’s not too soon to think about putting some student teams together for that. Most high school students we’ve seen have competed in the Game Design or IT Challenge.. I’m hoping we see some highly motivated students enter this year though. Of course I ran into more stuff than that last week. This week’ links include a number of opportunities for students and teachers.

Start with the NCWIT Award for Aspirations in Computing for high school girls.

The NCWIT Award for Aspirations in Computing honors young women active and interested in computing and technology. We are looking for next generation of technical talent. Award winners receive cool prizes, gadgets, scholarships and all girls can join a community of fellow technically-inclined young women..

And don’t forget the NFTE World Series of Innovation that I wrote about last week. It’s a really interesting set of challenges for students in a wide range of ages.

Program Call for Participation ISTE 2012 Now open thru Oct. 5 San Diego here we come. Are you doing interesting things in your computer science courses? We really need more CS related presentations at ISTE. There are always a good bunch of CS teachers there looking for new ways to do things.

Do you have things planned for Computer Science Education week? http://www.csedweek.org/ “December 4-10, 2011 – is a call to action to share information and offer activities that will advocate for computing and elevate computer science education for students at all levels.”

Microsoft East Region Bloggers

2011-09-19T10:44:00.001-04:00

These days I am part of a larger team than I used to. There are some 22 of use including our manager. Everyone has a blog. This is the complete list.

Name	Blog
Peter Laudati	http://blogs.msdn.com/peterlau/
Rachel Appel	http://RachelAppel.com/downloads
Chris Bowen	http://blogs.msdn.com/cbowen/
Jim O'Neil	http://blogs.msdn.com/joneil
G. Andrew Duthie	http://blogs.msdn.com/gduthie/
David Isbitski	http://blogs.msdn.com/davedev/
Dani Diaz	http://smallandmighty.net/
Glen Gordon	http://blogs.msdn.com/glengordon/
Brian Hitney	http://www.structuretoobig.com/home/
Joe Healy	http://www.devfish.net/
Blain Barton	http://blogs.technet.com/blainbar/
John Baker	http://blogs.technet.com/johnbaker/
Yung Chou	http://blogs.technet.com/yungchou/
Bob Hunt	http://blogs.msdn.com/bobh/
Dan Stolts	http://blogs.technet.com/danstolts/
Ed Donahue	http://www.creepyed.com/
Lindsay Lindstrom	http://blogs.msdn.com/b/lindsay/
Alfred Thompson	http://blogs.msdn.com/AlfredTh
Tara E. Walker	http://blogs.msdn.com/tarawalker/
Andrew Parsons	http://blogs.msdn.com/andrewparsons
Edwin Guarin	http://blogs.msdn.com/b/edvangelist
Bob Familiar	http://blogs.msdn.com/bobfamiliar

What is an app?

2011-09-13T08:10:00.001-04:00

In the Mobile Game Design and Mobile App Design categories of the NFTE World Series of Innovation students are asked to design an app or a game for a mobile device such as an Windows Phone. But what do an “app” mean in that context? The meaning of words changes over time. I hear that the word “awful” used to mean the same thing as “awesome” but over time awful was used so often in a sarcastic way that the meaning changed. Seems plausible – true or not. A word today that seems to also be changing meaning is “app.” In general it is a short form of the word “application” as you can see in this partial definition from Wikipedia “Application software, also known as an application or an "app", is computer software designed to help the user to perform specific tasks. ” Increasingly though the word app is used as a short form of “mobile application” or “mobile app.” That’s a nuanced meaning to some but I think “app” is starting to have a narrower more specific usage than a short form for the more general term “application.” If I had to define it I might say something like “a small application with a simple to use user interface for performing one or more closely related activities. Generally on a mobile computing device.”

What we are talking about for the NFTE World Series of Innovation are small application not some huge monolithic application like one would add memory to their high powered desktop to run.

NFTE is proud to have Microsoft as the presenting sponsor of the World Series of Innovation. Microsoft is issuing a challenge for students to create mobile phone apps and games that raise awareness and provide solutions for common student and school issues. Microsoft will provide the winning teams with a development partner to take the idea and bring it to market.

The other thing about apps is that they tend to be personal. By that I mean they are designed to be useful for individuals. Apps help people find their way, help them get information from online sources, and in short help them solve personal problems. Here are some sample ideas for apps from the NFTE World Series Toolkit that teachers receive after registering:

Helping new students find their way around a school
Making friends and building the school community
Managing school and class schedules
Dealing with bullying
Improving the school grounds (cleaning it, building new features)
Improving school safety
Helping students and schools protect and improve the environment
Help students get and stay healthy
Simple learning games—helping students learn subjects (math, geography, science, history)

Here is an example of a simple app that students might want to create (or use themselves!)

Nearly every school publishes a handbook, and most have web sites that contain important information, such as school directory, maps, class information, athletics,
latest news, and other details that are important to students. When people aren’t at a computer, however, it’s often difficult to get this information. In addition,
school administration and faculty need a quick, centralized way to get new information out to students and parents.

MySchoolApp is a Windows Phone app that provides school information to students and parents, such as news, school events, important links, faculty
directory, and school maps. School administrators can publish information and notifications via the app as easily as updating their school web site.
Windows Phone users can download the version for Bentley University here: http://bit.ly/nftebentley

MySchoolApp gives you access to school news, faculty directory, school calendar, maps, sports, alerts, and notifications—right from your smartphone! It’s great
for students and parents, as they can get the information anytime and anyplace, and it’s great for schools as it will help them communicate information quickly
and efficiently.

It’s simple, handy (a lot easier to carry as part of your phone than a hard copy paper book), and useful with timely information. What sorts of apps can your students design? The NFTE World Series of Innovation encourages that with the possibility of having the winning design turned into a real app for use by students everywhere.

Some additional links that may be useful:

Microsoft DreamSpark: Free software for student developers
Microsoft Imagine Cup: A world-wide competition for students 16 and older
Microsoft Innovative Educator Forum: a global community of educators using technology in innovative ways to improve the quality of learning

Interesting Links September 6 2011

2011-09-06T23:39:00.001-04:00

Labor Day in the US means a three-day weekend and I took advantage of it. I’d like to make note of a couple of my recent posts that seem to have more in common now that I read all the comments on them than they did initially.

Readability in Programming Languages - 30+ comments including some pointing out that wordy languages are not always so readable to non English speakers
Why are all programming languages in English? – 93 comments Something to make you think there for sure.
Languages That Make You Think – 6 comments that bring up more languages and they way they make you think

Together I think they form the basis for a long discussion about programming languages, internationalization, ease of learning vs. ease of use and generally what are the philosophical and other social aspects of programming language design. It’s more than just technical questions.

Interested in adding some cloud computing to your mobile device development? From Mark Hindsbo (@mhindsbo) I see that Microsoft has released an Azure toolkit to help bring the cloud to all devices with Android tools just released to join tools for iPhone and Windows Phone.

Stuart Ball (via @Innovativeteach) announces more great Kinect stuff from the UK Partners in Learning Teachers K Team.

The latest ISTE SIG for Computer Teachers newsletter (PDF) is now available. As always some good information there. I’ve been a member of ISTE and SIGCT for years and find it well worth my time and energy BTW.

Last week marked the 20th anniversary of Microsoft Research (MSFTResearch) where they are doing all sorts of cool stuff. Scott Lum (@scottlum) pointed me at this In-depth look inside Microsoft Research and their nerdy research projects via Wired Mag

Speaking of Microsoft Research (MSFTResearch ) last week they Tweeted a suggestion that people “Check out .NET Gadgeteer, a rapid prototyping device developed by Microsoft Research, now available commercially.” It’s a great new way to create programmable devices. Lots of good educational possibilities.

The ever creative Vicki Davis (@coolcatteacher) blogged about “Our Freshman Software Exploration Project (6 Days of Wonder)” Of course I found her discussion of how they use Microsoft OneNote particularly interesting but she has more stuff as well. OneNote is one of Microsoft’s lesser known gems with huge value in education.

Chris Bowen (@ChrisBowen) is a developer evangelist at Microsoft and a great guy. He recently announced an upcoming New England Code Camp 16 - October 29th, Waltham, MA - Save the date! While most attendees are professional developers the sessions are wide ranging and I suspect a lot of educators and STUDENTS will find value in attending. Check out Chris’ blog post for more information.

Want to become an entrepreneur? Watch @IEEEtv’s Young Entrepreneurs video sponsored by @Microsoft to learn what you need to make it happen.

A couple of regular links to Microsoft’s Tech Student blog

Interesting post on Ethical hacking on the CSTA blog Follow them on Twitter at @csteachersa

Great article about Serious Play Conference & Microsoft taking the "Productivity Games" approach to Education

Girls Go Geek… Again! - Fog Creek Blog a great reminder that programming was once “women’s work” and that we really need to get women back into software.

Interesting Links 29 August 2011

2011-08-28T19:36:00.001-04:00

Hurricane Irene was the big news on the east coast of the US and parts of the Caribbean last week. Oh and there was a surprising east coast earthquake last week as well. Quite some week. But I still managed to collect some links to share. If you were in the storm area I hope you weathered the storm.

The new Microsoft in Education blog aggregates blog posts from a number of the education related blogs by Microsoft people and teams. This blog is one of them but there are many more. From this blog I found a link to a post on the Office in Education blog called A teacher’s thoughts on Windows SkyDrive (video) If you don’t use SkyDrive for cloud storage and sharing with others check out that video.

The latest in a series of videos by the people at Channel 9 focusing on tours of the Microsoft campus show how the Building 4 remodel made room for The Garage. Don’t miss the special Coca Cola machine they have there. Pretty much every flavor Coca Cola has in one machine.

For some kids, back to school means back to cyberbullying. Microsoft is helping to Stop Cyberbullying – Read more about it on the official Microsoft blog.

I found this post at the Communications of the ACM blog pretty interesting - Password Policies are Getting Out of Control There are lots of discussion points there especially around the trade offs between ease of use and security.

Ed Donahue collected a bunch of links to Windows Phone 7 icons libraries. If you are developing for Windows Phone 7 you may find these links particularly useful

Check this video out -- Microsoft U.S. Education CTO, Cameron Evans interviews Johnny Kissko, Johnny is doing some interesting things with Kinect in the classroom. Speaking of Johnny be sure to check out his Kinect in Education website.

Start with this blog post titled Kinect in Education: How to Create Content-Relevant Games

Last but not least, from @SpringboardBlog a blog post by one of our summer high school interns - Windows Phone Student App of the Week: Free Dictionary

Interesting Links 20 August 2011

2011-08-20T21:50:00.001-04:00

No out of the area travel for me last week. It was nice to sleep in my own bed every night. This is not to say that I wasn’t busy. I had some meetings with the people at FIRST robotics for example. They are doing some pretty interesting things with technology these days. They are a Microsoft shop and their whole operation runs on Microsoft software including their impressive field management system for their competitions. It’s always exciting to hear what they are up to. I also kept my eyes open for interesting things to share and have a reasonable list again this week. Hopefully you find some of it useful.

Microsoft runs a small high school internship program mostly in the Redmond WA home office. Recently Hélène Martin (aka @purplespatula on Twitter) wrote about her student’s summer as Microsoft High School Interns

In a change of pace from strictly computer science related things here is a post on Microsoft software for various college majors Just in time for back to school and lots of it relevant for high school students as well.

Great minds need great notebooks. See how OneNote could've helped make a better light bulb A fun little look at how OneNote can be used.

New Book: FRIENDLY F# through Game Development and XNA Looks interesting for people interested in this powerful functional language and game development.

Super-Detailed First (MashUp)Windows Phone 7 App Walkthrough –this post by Randy Guthrie shows one easy way to create Windows Phone apps.

New Blog Post from one of our Microsoft high school interns is Windows Phone Student App of the Week: Liverpool Chants Lite, Juventus Chants Lite, Barca Chants Lite These are football (soccer for us Yanks) chants for various British teams.

Nice article about a pilot teaching programming in High Schools using Microsoft .NET Gadgeteer. This hardware is coming soon and it looks like it will find a place in a lot of schools over time.

Official Building Window 8 twitter account at @BuildWindows8 The official Building Windows 8 blog is at http://blogs.msdn.com/b8 So if you are interested in keeping up with the official news on Windows 8 now you know where to look.

There is a new computer science teacher blog out. Check out Doug Bergman's new blog. He's an innovative educator & part time alligator catcher. I met Doug this summer and am enjoying his posts so far.

You’re seen all sorts of work cloud generators in the past but how about one that works on source code? Well there is a Source Code Word Cloud Generator out now. I’ve only played with it a bit but I see some interesting potential here. And some fun.

Don’t forget about Windows Phone Mango Jump Start developer training August 23-24! Register for LIVE & FREE expert-led training from Rob Miles & Andy Wigley. I understand it will be recorded but the video will not be available for a couple of weeks. So if you are in a hurry to learn try and attend while it is live.

Ready or Not–New School Year About To Start

2011-08-19T07:52:00.001-04:00

Well according to my Twitter feed a lot of schools in the US south are back to school. Teachers are reporting for duty and students are expected any day now. My post from 2007 called What Do You Do the First Day of Class is getting a surprising amount of traffic. Posts with programming projects (that link brings up a list of posts tagged for projects or visit my Interesting Projects–A Collection post) are also getting more than the usual amount of traffic. So I’m pretty sure that a lot of people are getting ready for the new school year. Maybe you are all ready for school. Maybe you are not. Maybe you are one of those people who just never starts preparing. But ready or not students are going to be showing up soon. Are you excited?

If you do nothing else I urge you to get excited. If you can’t actually be excited, summer is after all hard to give up, please prepare to act excited for your student’s sake. As the expression goes “fake it until you make it.” Students are going to assume that if the teacher isn’t excited about what they are teaching that they don’t need to be excited either. That can be a poor way to start off the school year.

I’m excited about the new school year. I hope to visit more schools and talk to more students than ever before. If you are in the New England area and would like a guest speaker let me know and we’ll see what we can work out. Perhaps for Computer Science Education Week? (see a recent CSTA blog post on CS Ed Week for more ideas and the CS Ed Week website for resources.) This can be a great week for expanding knowledge of and interest in your school’s computer science courses.

How are you fixed for software? For you labs make sure you have a subscription to MSDN AA for great professional level software from Microsoft. And make sure you sign up your school for DreamSpark. More software than even you geekest student can use all of – and for FREE! Doesn’t get much better than free. The image below only shows some of what is available.

Curriculum resources? Visit the Faculty Connection page and load up on free curriculum resources. XNA for game development? We’ve got it! And more coming. Expression Studio for web design courses? We’ve got that too! Kodu for the very young? Got it! Small Basic for middle school and high school? Got that too! In fact check out this post for Microsoft software for various college majors Just in time for back to school and much of it useful in high school as well as college.

There are a lot of resources out there and a lot of them are free. Take advantage of as many as you need or can use. Let’s get students excited! Have a great school year everyone!

Windows Phone Development Training Online

2011-08-14T17:10:00.001-04:00

SO you probably know that a new version of the Windows Phone software is coming very soon. If you are planning on teaching phone development you may also be thinking “I wonder how I can get some training on this?” Well you are in luck. Online training is coming!

“Mango” Jump Start! Aug. 23-24! Pass it on…

That's right, Microsoft MVPs Rob Miles and Andy Wigley are back! Microsoft Learning hosted a Windows Phone 7 Jump Start (plus an update course) last year and it was an absolute smash. Mobile application developers raved about the fast-paced, demo-rich approach, the timeliness of real-world content on new technology, as well as the engaging and often-times humorous delivery. Now that "Mango" has made such a huge splash, they have put together another great course.

This two-day live virtual class, Building Applications for Windows Phone Mango Jump Start, is specially tailored for developers looking to build cool applications and games for the new Windows Phone Mango Platform.

Dates: August 23-24, 2011
Time: 8:00am – 4:00pm PST
Duration: 8 hours/day, including hour lunch break
Registration Link: http://bit.ly/Mango-Jump

Mango is an important leap forward in Microsoft’s overall mobile strategy and the developer community has taken notice. Now is the time to embrace the “tile-and-app” UI and reap the rewards Mango provides your development team and user community. Here's an overview of what Rob and Andy will cover:

Day One — August 23, 2011 | 8am-5pm PDT | Live online training
• Building Windows Phone Apps with Visual Studio 2010
• Silverlight on Windows Phone – Introduction
• Silverlight on Windows Phone – Advanced
• Using Expression to Build Windows Phone Interfaces
• Windows Phone Fast Application Switching
• Windows Phone Multi-tasking & Background Tasks
• Using Windows Phone Resources (Bing Maps, Camera, etc.)

Day Two — August 24, 2011 | 8am-5pm PDT | Live online training
• Application Data Storage on Windows Phone
• Using Networks with Windows Phone
• Windows Azure and Windows Phone
• Notifications on Windows Phone
• XNA for Windows Phone
• Selling a Windows Phone Application

Innovative Education Forum–Judging Day

2011-07-29T14:56:00.001-04:00

Wow! Just WOW! I spent yesterday judging teacher projects as part of the US Innovative Educator Forum in Redmond. It was absolutely inspiring. In fact I would go as far as to say this was the most encouraging day in regards to American education I have ever spent. And yes that includes learning about some great things at various ISTE conferences. Yes, that is strong but I mean it. There were 70 some projects (read a brief on each of them at 2011 U.S. Innovative Educators Forum Day 1–A Brief Summary) with teachers from kindergarten through high school, public schools, private schools, charter schools, rich areas, poor areas, and all sorts of geographies. The common factors though were dedicated teachers doing innovative things to improve learning for their students. Knowing there are teachers like this who are sharing their ideas with others is very encouraging to me.

Clearly all these teachers love their students, they love teaching, and they are fearless in trying new things. Another common factor is putting some trust in their students. Even second grade students (a couple of examples come to mind) have teachers allowing their students a role in decision making. The results are impressive. The one question that always comes up is “will this impact standardized test scores?” As anyone in education knows standardized tests are far from a great way to judge learning. But as one teacher told me “just because it is on the standardized test doesn’t mean it has to be boring.” So true. Good teaching is not boring. In fact I would argue, and I think many of the teachers here would agree, the less boring the more learning goes on.

So what else is going on? The day yesterday started with an opening keynote by John Medina author of

Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School (9780979777745): John Medina: Books

John also gave a keynote at the most recent ISTE conference. If you ever get a chance to hear him speak you should take advantage of it. He is dynamic, funny, and informative. I bought a copy of his book and had him sign it for me. It is my airplane reading for the trip home tomorrow. He talked about two of the 12 “rules” from his book and I can’t wait to dig into the rest of them. I think there are lessons for educators (and others) in that book. It was a great start to the day.

Then we had the judging. I visited nine assigned projects and several others. I only wish I had had time to talk to all of the teachers. I also wish we could have had a lot more people in to hear these teachers talk about their projects. From conversations I had with teachers it appears that most of the teachers here (including the educators who are judges – which is most of them – list here) did a lot of networking and learning from each other. The thing I heard most was “I have learned so much.” People are going home with many more ideas then they came with.

The judging team meet first in small groups and then as a large group to discuss the projects and highlight those that were on the tops of people’s lists. Note that all of the projects were great so we are looking for the best of the best not separating wheat from chaff by any means. All of these teachers are amazing! I don’t know who the winners are yet. We’ll find out that tonight. A total of ten teams in several categories will be headed for the worldwide event in November. I need to get me an invitation.

Later today we will have a closing keynote by Jane McGonigal, director of Game Research and Development, Institute for the Future and author of

Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (9781594202858): Jane McGonigal: Books

I have heard her speak before and I am sure she will be both interesting and thought provoking. After that we have some more social events with the awards gals closing the day and the event. I’ll post links to the winners once I have them.

Are your students entered in the Windows Phone app contest

2011-07-11T12:16:00.001-04:00

This Summer, build Windows Phone 7 apps and you could earn exciting prizes to catch a movie, eat ice – cream, buy camping gear and more!! This special competition is especially for students. It’s a great incentive to get creative and do something interesting and possibly win some prizes and make some money. The software is free through DreamSpark as well!

Lots of chances to win:

* The first 1,000 students to publish will receive a copy of Halo Reach®, Fable 3®, Dance Central™, Kinect Joy Ride or Kinect Sports game for the Xbox 360®. Each week we will randomly select 2 winners from among all entries received to win one $25 gift card. At the close of the sweepstakes the student with the most approved apps published to the marketplace will receive a Windows Phone 7.

Interesting Links 5 July 2011

2011-07-05T15:30:00.001-04:00

Wow! What a week it has been. I came home from ISTE in time for the Fourth of July holiday. I’m still mulling over all I heard and learned at ISTE. If things ever quiet down I’ll try to write some of them up. As it was I spent a lot of the long weekend doing work around the house. Yes, we computer geeks do things other than play with computers and the Internet. I installed kitchen cabinets for example. And some yard work. The best of the weekend was spending time with family though. I am putting this post together from Rapid City, South Dakota where I am visiting the SD Schools of Mines and Technology and their wonderful program for native American students. I will be judging some software designed and written by the students. Should be fun. And now a few links.

First off it was great to see Note-Taker, Imagine Cup finalists, win an IDEA Design Award These students are not just doing software that is for a contest but are writing software to change lives so it is great to see them get even more recognition. Speaking of the Imagine Cup, have you voted for you favorite Imagine Cup team today?http://www.imaginecup.com/pca Come on - you know you want to. The teams from the US need some more love. They have great projects and we should all show them that we are supporting them against the rest of the world.

And Andrew Parsons has some updates on the Imagine Cup game competition:

Over in the UK they had a big Kinect for Windows event and the team put up a great blog post with lots of videos. Be sure to check it out if you are interested in where this Natural User Interface device is going.

Speaking about Kinect, visit the new Microsoft Kinect in Education web site to see what we are thinking about in that space.

One last link, this one from ISTE, they have released the new NETS for Computer Science Educators (pdf)

Interesting Links 20 June 2011

2011-06-19T20:41:00.001-04:00

This time next week I will be in Philadelphia for ISTE. I’m pretty excited about it. Some really great things going on there. Plus I get to see a lot of people face to face. many of these people I have met in person before but many of them I will be meeting face to face for the first time after interacting with them through this blog, through Twitter, and through email. The face to face meetings are the best! If you will be at ISTE I hope you will look me up either at the Microsoft booth or one of the sessions I am attending. I will be at a number of the SIGCT promoted events and several bigger Microsoft events. I’ll have a full “what is Microsoft doing at ISTE” with an emphasis on what I’m up to (hey it is my blog ) tomorrow but if you want a jump start visit the Microsoft at ISTE page now. And now for some more links.

Myra Deister, CS and math teacher and member of the CSTA Board of Directors, asks how to you set your Priorities for making sure everything gets done. She notes that teaching computer science takes more time than teaching math. Is that the same for everyone I wonder?

Challenge, discovery, insight, surprise: Rader & Grzeda AP Students accepted ‘missions’ in InterroBang that had an impact in the community and once completed, each ‘deed’ was given points correlating into the grading process.

In case you missed it, Microsoft released the beta of a supported software development kit for the Kinect Sensor device for use with Windows. (I wrote about it here) Earlier when the news that this SDK was first coming one of the demos what a drivable lounge chair that was controlled by hand motions and a Kinect. Last week those nice people at @coding4fun released information about how to do it yourself - Jellybean, the Kinect Drivable Lounge Chair Do you have a robotics or engineering program as well as a programming course? This may be the cross curriculum idea or at least the germ of a whole bunch of new ideas.

In computer history news, IBM turned 100 last week. Yes, the former Calculating Tabulating and Recording company has been around since long before computers.

Lastly, the Microsoft Feed web site (on twitter @Microsoft_Feed) did an email interview with me and posted it at Meet Alfred Thompson. IT came out pretty well if I do say so myself.

Share Kodu Cup Winners Announced

2011-06-13T10:41:00.001-04:00

Today the Unlimited Potential team announced the winners of the inaugural US Kodu Cup competition.

Today we are announcing the winners of the first U.S. Kodu Cup. It’s a competition that challenged kids across the United States (from the age of 9 to 17) to use Kodu – a free game development tool from Microsoft – to create their own video game for the chance to win great prizes and the chance to attend the Imagine Cup World finals in New York City in July.

Kodu was created by FUSE labs in Microsoft Research to help children learn how to use computers while developing useful skills such as problem solving, creative thinking and planning in a fun, engaging and creative way. Kodu is proving to be a great took for fostering children’s interest in exploring a career in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM).

There were some surprises in the entries – namely that students found things to do and ways to use the tool that the people who created it had never thought about. And of course there was amazing creativity and a lot of hard work in evidence. That makes the results even more exciting to me. I love the themes of the winning entries as well. The entry by Hannah Wyman 10 years old, from Massachusetts, had a theme around saving the environment by planting trees and getting soot out of the air. A very creative game for sure. You can see her video below but visit the Unlimited Potential blog post to see more of them.

More information on Kodu and STEM education

Kodu game lab site
Kodu Cup web site
Blog: Making games can contribute to learning
Blog: Can kids love math and science more than ice cream?
STEM whitepaper (PDF)

A Collection of Good Posts

2011-06-10T11:39:00.001-04:00

My friend Edwin Guarin (aka the EdVangelist) has been busy this week and I wanted to send out some link love to some really interesting posts he has written.

Some good stuff there. And something for everyone.

Imagine Cup Game Design Competitors 2011

2011-06-04T12:32:00.001-04:00

Andrew Parsons has been working hard to highlight the top teams in this year’s worldwide Imagine Cup. He has a series of blog posts which I highly recommend.

The first one is a set of three articles highlighting the finalists for the three tracks of Game Design. These are the fifteen teams from all over the world heading to New York City in July to compete head to head. Definitely worth checking these out:

Meet the finalists – XNA – http://bit.ly/ICGD11k
Meet the finalists – Mobile – http://bit.ly/ICGD11l
Meet the finalists – Web – http://bit.ly/ICGD11m

The second set is a series of ten articles that showcases all competitor entries from the final online round of Game Design. There are more than 100 games shown in this series from dozens of countries and it’s a great resource to show off the variety of game genres, styles, and themes.

Part 1 - http://bit.ly/ICGD11a (_dreamBender – BJTU_YF703)
Part 2 - http://bit.ly/ICGD11b (Bliizz – CodeOne)
Part 3 - http://bit.ly/ICGD11c (CrashGames – EnvoSeven1)
Part 4 - http://bit.ly/ICGD11d (exporithm – Geekologic)
Part 5 - http://bit.ly/ICGD11e (GimmeGimmes – INFOSTROY)
Part 6 - http://bit.ly/ICGD11f (Ingesub Game Lab Team Rocket – Luskanya)
Part 7 - http://bit.ly/ICGD11g (Milworms – Pyro)
Part 8 - http://bit.ly/ICGD11h (Quegee Team – SDEG)
Part 9 - http://bit.ly/ICGD11i (Signum Fidei – Team Nucleus)
Part 10 - http://bit.ly/ICGD11j (Team Rubic – WickedTeam)

Interesting Links Post 31 May 2011

2011-05-30T19:55:00.001-04:00

Since yesterday was Memorial Day I posted something just a bit fun and saved my links post for today. I hope those of you in the US enjoyed a three day weekend and also found time to remember those men and women who paid the ultimate sacrifice for our country. I spent time with family including my World War II combat veteran father. I cherish all the time I have left with him as so many of his generation are now gone.

Now for some links.

Here is a bit of the real world of software development that they don’t teach you in school. This was tweeted and retweeted a lot last week. “ And the award for "Most Legally Encumbered Hello World Program" goes to Oracle for http://goo.gl/gpWFR” A few lines of code and a lot of lines of legal boilerplate.

A number of good articles in the Microsoft Boston blog including this one about how Microsoft’s Elevate America Community Initiatives are making a difference in the lives of Bostonians. And this All About the Boston MTC – Q&A with Sven Ingard, MTC Director The MTC is one of Microsoft’s interesting field offices that works with customers before large projects get rolling.

The big summer doings for Microsoft’s international academic relations teams are the 124 student teams who are competing to solve the world's toughest issues. See GOOD Magazines' favorite five projects

New Game Development Education on App Hub for the Windows Phone Mango Tools Release. This is where I am learning things for my posts like XNA and Visual Basic–Your First Lesson and Windows Phone 7 Games in Visual Basic

Have you read about the Microsoft Tech Student of the Month for May 2011? – Kevin Ballinas

I saw this interesting Tweeted link from @weemooseus “Red Hot: The Computer Science Job Market: (Ok HS, where are your CS teachers when your students need them?)” In spite of news stories like this I keep hearing of schools cutting back on computer science education. It doesn’t make any sense to me.

Imagine Cup WorldWide Game Competition Finalists 2011

2011-05-23T18:22:00.001-04:00

Andrew Parsons is the Game Capitan for the Worldwide Imagine Cup Game competition. This gives him a good close look at the competitors especially the finalists. This week he has posted summaries of the finalists in the three competition fields.

I grabbed some of the information about the US teams in the finals but you’ll want to take a look at all the other competitors in all three categories.

Team Name: ICsquared

Game Name: Embryonic

Country: United States

Embryonic is a combination of arcade style games to promote awareness and education of maternal health. The primary game is an Asteroids-style game where the player is put in charge of protecting an unborn child while later levels revolve around other parts of the process, including the umbilical cord and nutrients being delivered, as well as an awareness of rudimentary genetics.

Team Name: Team Dragon

Game Name: Azmo the Dragon

Country: United States

Azmo the Dragon is a 2D side-scrolling game that helps children learn about their asthma as they play as a dragon who destroys civilizations.

Interesting Links 23 May 2011

2011-05-21T04:13:00.000-04:00

Every week end I go to grab by Twitter stream and the notes I have taken as ask myself “Do I have any thing interesting this week?” Invariably I have more than I expected. Stuff flows like crazy many weeks. While I pass a lot of it back out via Twitter I find that that is a transient media. Oh it’s great if you have time to follow it (and I don’t always) but you are bound to miss a lot. It also doesn’t feel like a good archive either. So something may come by while you don’t need it but not be easy to find when you do. That is why I believe that these weekly posts are a better way for me (and I hope others) to find things when I need them. Blogs are searchable.

Tara Walker recorded an hour long workshop on building Windows Phone apps that is now available for viewing. May be a good way for you (or students) to get started.

Coding for Fun (@coding4fun) posted some resources for the "graphically challenged" among us with places we can get resources that can be used in XNA games. Trust me – your programming students are probably not the graphic artists them may think they are. These are useful resources.

Learning to learn Is a great post by Garth, a CS teacher and frequent commenter on this blog, who does what good teachers do - help students to learn how to learn more. I recommend this post and Garth’s blog in general.

Have you students seen the big summer deal from Microsoft? Qualified students who buy a new Windows PC and get a free Xbox 360, too. For your graduating seniors – every dorm room can use a new Windows PC and an Xbox 360.

Programming concepts in Scratch is a very helpful post from Gail Carmichael (@gailcarmichael) . If you are using Scratch or looking into using Scratch for teaching computer science or programming concepts check out her post.

Some interesting things from Microsoft Research (@MSFTResearch:) this week How much energy is your computer really using? Download Joulemeter and find out. May be just the thing to spark conversations about power usage of computers and how that impacts both society in general and computer hardware design in specific.

Teachers looking to attend Microsoft’s Innovative Educators Forum this summer have created videos. There is a people’s choice voting now open and you can vote for your favorite People's Choice video – Two most "liked" videos go to MSFT Innovative Educator Forum ( via @TeachTec)

Great article by @Dean Kamen on @CNN : Want U.S. to keep tech edge? Teach kids science

Insightful post by Mark Guzdial (@guzdial) If you want CS in High School, Require CS in college You have to wonder why don’t more colleges require some computer science? They require math and other sciences. CS is pretty key to the future of almost all fields. If they did require it in college, as Mark says, a lot more high schools would jump to teach it.

I had to link to this video -- 5 year old & Visual Studio – In it a five year old explains why “she likes” Visual Studio 2008. It’s funny, its cute, but there is a lot about what is in the product shown in the video.

Sitting = Bad is an info graphic posted by Ed Donahue (@CreepyEd) about how bad sitting is for you. I have been thinking about a standing desk myself. I’ve also read some things that suggest that standing desks might be helpful for the sort of student who just can’t sit still as well. Either way some things to think about.

One last thing, if you are on Twitter I hope you will follow my updates at @AlfredTwo Thanks!

Seth Godin Needs To Visit a Library

2011-05-16T12:02:00.001-04:00

Now I am married to a school librarian so a) I have a bias toward them and b) I have a bit of an idea of how they think and how libraries operate. OK not all libraries or all librarians but at least one really good one. So I had to read this post by Seth Godin (The future of the library)

In that post he describes a future librarian that sounds a lot like my wife and a library that sounds a lot like the library she is always working towards. But what Seth misses is the reason librarians still need to fight for sharing and borrowing on eBook readers. In a word – access.

It’s all nice and fuzzy to say you can get everything you need on the Internet if you have a nice set of Internet connected devices and good access to the Internet everywhere you go. And Seth probably has that. Many of the patrons of most libraries, especially the libraries that serve poor and rural areas do not have those things. For these patrons even inexpensive books are outside their price range and 24/7 Internet access is still the realm of science fiction. For these readers the loan of an eBook reader is a door into future possibilities. If librarians do not fight to get them access to this technology and to the information on them they may never get to see it.

Also librarians have for the most part redefined themselves away from guardians of books to sharers of information. (well the good ones anyway)They have embraced media of all types from eBook readers to videos (online and on hard media), online databases to Internet searches. They are all about helping people find information and entertainment (yes people do read for entertainment). There are lots of computers in most libraries. It’s still hard to take those computers home though and if someone doesn’t have a computer at home (or Internet) than eBook readers are yet one more tool in the librarian’s toolbox.

Seth says:

Librarians that are arguing and lobbying for clever ebook lending solutions are completely missing the point. They are defending library as warehouse as opposed to fighting for the future, which is librarian as producer, concierge, connector, teacher and impresario.

Librarians are not missing the point. Seth is missing the point. Librarians do see themselves as “producer, concierge, connector, teacher and impresario” and have for years. Seth misses the point that librarians are about access and sharing by almost any means or media possible. They are not defending the library as warehouse but the library as a source for information sharing. And that is something you would think Seth would be onboard with.

Interesting Posts 16 May 2011

2011-05-15T22:53:00.001-04:00

Computer Science teacher Pat Yongpradit seems to be everywhere on the educational blogosphere lately. I posted about his 5-6 week XNA course curriculum last week. Vicki Davis (@coolcatteacher) posted an interview on her Cool Cat Teacher Blog posted a video interview him - Attracting Girls to Technology and Science. Pat himself had a post on the Huffington Post about My Year as a Teacher Beauty Queen: Microsoft Innovative Educator Forum in which he recounts some of what has happened to him since he was involved with last year’s Microsoft Innovative Educator Forum.

Speaking of the Microsoft Innovative Educator Forum, IEF awardee Cheryl Arnett has a new blog post in the Huffington Post called Learn how to transform education to meet the needs of 21st century learners.

I like this article by a pair of Advanced Placement English teachers in Virginia who utilize InterroBang (@playinterrobang) in their classroom. The article is "Challenge, Discovery, Insight, Surprise" and they wrote about it for Best In Tech Today

Play InterroBang

@playinterrobang
The socially-networked, mission-based, problem-solving game in partnership with the Exploratorium, Learn and Serve, sponsored by Microsoft
http://playinterrobang.com/

Nice blog post by Ed Donahue on the recent Digigirlz Tech Camp: Baltimore 2011. DigiGirlz is a wonderful program designed to help introduce girls and young women learn about and develop an interest in technology and careers in technology.

Have you ever wondered how committees select what presentations are included in a conference? On the CSTA blog you can read Choosing CS&IT Conference Sessions about how sessions were selected for this summer’s Computer Science & Information Technology Conference in New York. BTW you really want to attend this conference if you are a high school (or middle school) computer science teacher or district curriculum coordinator charged with building CS programs.

I don’t often post to my blog over the weekend but this past Saturday I did write a blog post: about Returning Data From A Second Form in Visual Basic and/or C# If your students are looking at using multiple forms or building custom dialogue forms that post will be useful.

Are you interested in images of historical devices? Checkout the Buxton Collection 30 Years of Interactive Technology.

Lastly I want to link to a few posts by my good friend Sam Stokes who works with higher education in California.

Teaching Students To Create Their Own Business

2011-05-06T07:24:00.001-04:00

One of the things that I tell students when I do career talks is that it has never been easier to start a software business than it is today. Many great companies have been started in hard economic times (Microsoft for example) and many have been started by people who were students at the time. Dell may be one of the more well known examples of that even though it is more hardware related. But new markets in games (for hand held devices like phones for example), cloud computing for fast, easy and scalable computer resources as well as easy availability of software bring a new round of low cost of entry. Technical skills are not all that you need though. The making of a company requires some entrepreneurship. While entrepreneurship is in large part an attitude and a confidence we don’t often teach the other skills that support the attitude and build the confidence students need. That’s why I really enjoyed a blog post in the TeachTec blog today. This is one you really want to read!

The article titled Can you develop the next Gates or Zuckerberg in high school? Combining computer science and entrepreneurship talks about a program that Doug Bergman has created in his school in South Carolina. The project is called Entrepreneurship through Xbox Game & Simulation Development .and I’ve included a blurb from a recent announcement of the 2011 U.S. Innovative Education Forum - Round One - Finalists Announced!

Doug Bergman, Porter-Gaud School (Charleston, SC)
Project: Entrepreneurship through Xbox Game & Simulation Development
Students in this hybrid computer science & entrepreneurship class learn how to manage and work on a single large computer programming project as well as develop their own software coding and problem-solving skills. They apply the equally important skills around entrepreneurism using the NFTE (Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship) curriculum, building and eventually presenting an actual business plan for the game idea they choose. Additionally students consider an area in their life (i.e., a subject they are passionate about, an extra-curricular area, or an idea that helps makes the world a better place) and they take that idea and create a game or simulation for the Xbox that teaches, demonstrates, and generates interest in the area they have chosen.

Doug is working cross the curriculum and really taking advantage of student interests to promote learning. He is working closely with his school IT department, Guidance, local colleges and local industry. Guest speakers through the course of the school year help “make it real” for students. It’s great stuff and I encourage you to read the full article.

Doug Bergman came to Microsoft’s attention through the Innovative Education Forum program. There is still a little over a week left to submit applications for the 2011 U.S. Innovative Education Forum. The final deadline to apply is May 15th. I’d love to see more computer science teachers submit and share what they are doing in their classrooms. There is a lot of exciting and truly innovative work going on, not just in computer science of course, and the Innovative Education Forums highlights many of them but we don’t know about them unless teachers tell us about them.

I’ll close with a picture of Doug Bergman and some of his students. Looks like they are having fun!

Most Read Posts–April 2011

2011-05-01T20:43:00.001-04:00

I thought it would be interesting to take a look at the top read blog posts from April 2011. I look at both web statistics and RSS statistics.In some ways I feel like the RSS statistics tell me the most about what is useful for my most regular readers. Although I know that several people who seldom if ever miss my posts (I love you all) read via web browsers many follow using RSS readers of some sort. The web hits come from search engines and in links. The search engine traffic is also very informative. It also lets me know that I am covering topics that people are interested in. Hopefully I am helping. The in links most often come when I get a little opinionated. OK I can live with that. So for what ever it is worth here are the top 10 posts according to RSS statistics as provided by Feedburner.

Boring is Bad Computer science is interesting! And fun. Even world changing exciting! It should be taught that way.
US Imagine Cup Finals 2011– Up and Running The first of a number of posts I wrote while at the US Imagine Cup finals in Redmond Washing ton. I will be doing more from the world wide Imagine Cup in New York this summer.
Books for Computer Science Students Just what it seems. I could use more suggestions still.
Movies for Computer Science Students The second of three posts that make both lists this month. I made my suggestions against an other list from another web site – link to the other site is there
Cryptography is Hard Yes it is. But it is fascinating and educational as well. One of my favorite things.
Computer Science Curricula In Flux The new CS Principles course, updated draft curriculum recommendations from CSTA (have you commented on them yet?), and the CS 2013 project (can more people link to http://cs2013.org/ and help us get found more easily?) and more. Things are happening in computer science curriculum. Since this post I attended a two day meeting at the National Science Foundation that discussed what a first (think pre-AP) computer science course should look like in high school. I hope to blog about that soon.
Be Careful What You Wish For Some discussion of the recent bump in enrollment of university computer science and what it could mean if high schools had the same bump. Do we have the teaching capacity?
After The APCS Exam The AP Computer Science exam is this week. Earlier in April I posted my suggestions for educational things to do with students after the exam to keep them on task and learning.
The Internet is the Answer for School Reform – Or Is It My opinion pieces, which this is, tend to do better on the web or search engine traffic than among my regular subscribers. This one seems to have struck a chord though.
XozGaming–High School Team in the US Imagine Cup I love this story of two high school kids who were completely self taught in XNA game programing and who held their own against college students. They took fourth over a great many college and university teams.

And then there are the posts the analytics tool says are the top posts as read by web browsers. Mostly a different list with a couple the same. If you only read via RSS (which is how I read most blogs) you may have skipped by one of these and find it worth taking a second look.

Interesting Projects-A Collection A post from March that continued to get a lot of web traffic this month. Search engines or links? I’m not sure but I do think it is a useful post if you are looking for interesting and educational programming projects
Object Oriented Programming Is Dead – This is another post from March that was heavily linked to. The post it was suggested by seemed to get a lot of attention (much more than mine which is good) and a lot of others linked to this one of mine.
Microsoft Math 4.0 This post from January received a big boost because of a new in link and the fact that Math 4.0 is now available in a bunch more international languages. Your math people will love this one.
Books for Computer Science Students The first of a few posts that made both lists.
How Does Kinect Work This post from last November keeps getting a lot of search engine traffic. Hope they all are looking forward to the Kinect SDK (coming soon) as I am.
Be Careful What You Wish For An other post that made both lists.
Movies For Computer Science Students Yea! Three posts on both lists.
Programming Projects Using Arrays I guess a lot of people are searching for this sort of thing. I would have expected more in the fall during ramp up but if people are finding this post useful I’m happy.
Fizz Buzz A programming Question Yet another project post that continues to get traffic. All the great replies make it valuable in my opinion.
Credit Card Project Who knew there were that many people looking for information on parsing credit cards!

What was useful (or useless) to you? What topics should I be looking to research and blog more about? How can I be helpful to you this month?

DreamSpark, AppHub and Windows Phone Development

2011-04-26T18:17:00.001-04:00

So are your graduating high school seniors bored? or perhaps you are still looking for things to do after the AP CS exam. or maybe you know college or high school students looking to make a few bucks writing code? (Student Develops Games For Windows Phone 7) Edwin Guarin has a new post out called Dreamspark and App Hub Registration process REVEALED! that partners well with my post called Student Access to the AppHub for Windows Phone 7 with information for students who want to create Windows Phone applications and add them to the Windows Marketplace for free. All the information students (18+ I think sorry) need to know to get started is there. Or there and below.

Looking for learning materials? Visit the Windows Phone developer resources pages on App Hub. Here you will find topic pages so you can learn everything you need to know to create great apps and games for Windows Phone:

BTW if you are a high school teacher and want to make sure your students have access to DreamSpark check out Gautam Reddy’s wonderful blog post that explains the step by step of signing a high school up for DreamSpark

Enter the Student App-a-thon

2011-04-24T23:28:00.001-04:00

Bob Familiar (@bobfamiliar) and Lindsay Lindstrom (@LindsayInPhilly) have both been blogging about the Windows Phone Student App-a-thon! For US college students 18 and up.

Be one of the first 1,000 students to publish an App in the Windows Phone Marketplace between April 11^th and June 30th and choose between Halo Reach®, Fable®, or three other games for Xbox 360®. That’s not all. The student who publishes the most Apps will receive $5,000 cash or an equivalent prize package. The three students who publish the 2^nd, 3^rd, and 4^th most Apps will receive $1,000 each.

Computer Science Curricula In Flux

2011-04-07T13:55:00.001-04:00

I don’t know when I have ever seen as much going on with computer science curriculum going on at one time. In the K12 space there is an NSF initiative looking at a new pre-APCS course while the College Board, also with NSF support, is hard at work developing the AP CS Principles course. CSTA is reviewing and looking at updating the ACM K-12 CS Model Curriculum. With all that going on in K12 one might be tempted to think that was enough. But it’s not. There is actually an important curriculum review going on in higher education computer science curriculum.

Specifically the CS 2013 project is going on to review curriculum recommendations for undergraduate computer science curriculum in American (and potentially other) universities. This is an effort undertaken jointly by the ACM and the IEEE Computer Society, the two main computer science professional societies. This effort is still in the early stages but a steering committee has been appointed and is holding regular meetings virtually and face to face. The steering committee made a brief report at the recent SIGCSE conference and more public information will be available over time. The committee has opened a web site (from which I have copied some introductory information below) at http://cs2013.org

Computing Curriculum: Computer Science 2013 (CS2013) Overview
Following a roughly 10 year cycle, the ACM and IEEE Computer Society jointly sponsor the development of a Computing Curricula volume on Computer Science. These volumes have helped to set international curricular guidelines for undergraduate programs in computing. In the summer of 2010, planning for the next volume in the series, Computer Science 2013 (CS2013), began. The charter for this effort is given below.
Charter
To review the Joint ACM and IEEE/CS Computer Science volume of Computing Curricula 2001 and the accompanying interim review CS 2008, and develop a revised and enhanced version for the year 2013 that will match the latest developments in the discipline and have lasting impact.
The CS2013 task force will seek input from a diverse audience with the goal of broadening participation in computer science. The report will seek to be international in scope and offer curricular and pedagogical guidance applicable to a wide range of institutions. The process of producing the final report will include multiple opportunities for public consultation and scrutiny.

The membership of the committee includes faculty from many universities as well as a few representatives from industry. You can se the whole list at CS2013 Steering Committee. You will probably recognize some names there. If you get to the very last name on the second column you’ll find Alfred Thompson. Somewhat humbling to be in such august company but I’m doing my best to keep up.

Interesting Projects–A Collection

2011-03-27T13:54:00.001-04:00

It seems as though teachers are always looking for new projects to use with students. Projects get stale (at least to a teacher who has been grading lots of them for a long time) or seem to not fit with a current crop of students or just never seem right. So the hunt goes on for more. When I come up with programing projects I like to post them here on my blog for use, comments, feedback and in the hopes that people will help make them better. I tag them with the projects tag to make them easier for people to find as well. But recently it struck me that an annotated list of some of the more interesting projects might be in order. So here it is.

Programming Projects Using Arrays This is a collection for the APCS mailing list of projects teachers have suggested for teaching arrays. They should work with any programming language.

Whack Something Game for Windows Phone 7 – This is a “how to” I wrote for creating a whack a mole style game for the Windows Phone 7. It could easily be used/modified to create a similar game for Windows or the Xbox since it uses XNA Game Studio.

The Credit Card Project – Do you know how credit cards are validated? I think a lot of students would be interested in this project that includes knowing something about the codes that identify types of credit cards and a check digit to validate the number.

FizzBuzz–A Programming Question – this was based on an interview question I read about. The comments are interesting and include both a lot of discussion about this particular project and similar questions. This one uses loops and discussion statements in an interesting combination.

Lines Can Be Fun This is a discussion of some interesting graphical line drawing projects. There is some sample code using Small Basic but you could use these ideas in most languages that support simple graphics.

Would you play this game? A simulation of a card game with the idea of determining if it is a reasonable game to play as defined by being something one can actually win at. It uses random numbers, arrays and loops.

Visualizations and Sorting Some ideas around projects that show or play as in sound how sorting algorithms work. Something to make sorting more interesting than just “magic” behind the scenes.

ASCII Art For Fun and Projects – Old school ASCII art projects may seem passé but a lot of today’s students don’t know about them which makes these ideas “new to them.” And they can be fun.

Monte Carlo Simulation – Slot Machines – How do slot machines work? Add some graphics to this one and really make it rock.

Monte Carlo Simulation – Roulette – how does the house win at Roulette? Random numbers, probability and creating a simulation are all a part of this project.

Who Designed That User Interface – How would you design an ATM interface? Yeah it involves money. This is a chance to not only have students implement a user interface but learn about data checking/validation and how it all fits with usability.

Are You Using a Strong Password – On one hand this is a simple data validation project that looks at characters and does some evaluation. On the other hand it is an opportunity to talk about security, what makes a strong password and why strong passwords are important.

Coding Up A Coded Message – Not surprisingly this is about codes and cyphers. I find that a lot of younger kids are fascinated with hiding messages with codes. This allows for a lot of interesting character manipulation and some good algorithm discussions.

Fun With Formulas Did you know that horsepower was based on James Watt finding that a work horse could lift a 1,000 pound weight 33 feet in 60 seconds? I didn’t either but it makes for a fun project. Sample code in C#, Visual Basic and a screenshot of a cool solution table using Excel. Yep, programming sorts of things in Excel. Who knew?

Fun With Colors Move the sliders for red, blue and green to adjust the color values of a color display. This is the sort of thing designers use for all sorts of color picking routines. It shows something about how color mixing works as well as making a fast and easy project to let students experience success quickly.

Binary Number Game – A lot of traffic comes to this blog from people looking for ways to teach binary numbers. This post describes one good learning game/project and opens the door to more with a little imagination. One might as well make a game out of learning when possible.

The Four Digit Problem – How would you randomly pick a four digit number with no repeating digits? Would you use recursion? You could. Or loops? That would work as well. What’s the best way to do this/

A Simple Check Digit Project This project uses the formula for validating passport numbers. With more and more people needing passports at a younger and younger age this project has some relevance to many. Having a meaningful project to discuss check digits (which are apparently not as inherently interesting to everyone as the yare to me) makes this a pretty good project if I do say so myself.

US Imagine Cup People’s Choice Awards

2011-03-23T08:35:00.001-04:00

The Imagine Cup is the premier student technology competition in he world. Yeah, I get excited about it. The US finalists in the Software Design Invitational and the Game Design competition (two categories there) and been selected and are making their plans to attend the finals in Redmond Washington in April. Now it is also time for the public, people like you, to have your say on if these projects are genius or not? You'll decide!

Microsoft US Imagine Cup Fall finalists now have new team pages--check them out and get to know the teams: http://on.fb.me/2011ImagineCup

Of course I am completely unbiased. OK maybe not. I have a soft spot in my heart for high school students competing against college students so I may have voted for the high school team, Xoz Gaming. Their project, Strain is a Windows real time strategy game where you defend the world against a global pandemic.

There are lots of great teams with lots of great ideas. Visit the Facebook page, check them out, and vote early and often (you can vote every day) for your favorite. Oh and by the way there are prizes for people who vote to win as well.

FutureFed Expert Videos: Dan Kasun on Making Open Government Data Valuable

2011-03-17T12:55:00.000-04:00

Dan Kasun talks about making government information more available and valuable.

Rebirth of DIY Software Development

2011-03-09T15:57:00.001-05:00

In the heady, exciting, almost wild West atmosphere of the early days of PCs it seemed like almost everyone I knew was writing software in hopes of making a little extra money. Shareware was big. That was the idea that you would give away the program and if people really liked it they would pay for it. And since there was so little software out there other people were packaging their software in a nice format and selling copies though local computer stores. Computer stores back then were desperate for software to sell to help sell computers. The cost of entry was low – you needed a PC and the development software that came with it. If you were really ambitious you’d buy Turbo PASCAL or some other more professional development environment. The other thing that was big was more or less ordinary people developing small software projects for work. Not necessarily great software but good solid (ok maybe not solid) but cheap and accessible software. Over time though the “real professionals” took over as standards became higher.

We, many of us in the industry, expected programming to become easier to the point where everyone would be programming. That, alas, has not yet happened. What has happened though is that there is a new market for software. Portable devices like Windows Phone 7 have online marketplaces now. So does the set top box video game market! And there are tools that are free or cheap and even easy to use. Students can get development tools for Windows Phone 7 and Xbox 360 from Dreamspark. There are learning resources, some at DreamSpark, and some from other places (App Hub for one) that are also free.

This is sparking a rebirth of the small, even one person, development organization. Students are creating and selling programs on Xbox marketplace and Windows Phone 7 marketplace and making real money. Some though sales and some though advertising supported software which is something that didn’t exist even a few years ago. Another difference with this new environment is that this time companies and businesses realize that they need, or at least want, to have applications for these new devices. There are not really enough people ready and trained to create them (see More Computer Scientists Needed To Create Mobile Apps). What does this mean to students today? I think Mark Guzdial said it well in his post titled The advantage of computing goes to those who create, not those who use.

Sure it is important to know how to use computers and to use various applications but the real advantage goes to those who create. Are we creating enough creators?

Today’s post inspired by these somewhat related articles.

The Prosaic, DIY Reality of Software Houses from the Atlantic
More Computer Scientists Needed To Create Mobile Apps BrainTrack
The advantage of computing goes to those who create, not those who use Mark Guzdial

Dream. Build. Play. is back for 2011

2011-03-01T05:41:00.000-05:00

Honestly if you are a student you REALLY want to enter the Imagine Cup game development competition. Really you do. But if you missed some of the deadlines (tsk tsk tsk) or you are looking for another game development competition to enter than Dream. Build. Play may be for you. If you are a hobbyist game developer, or you are that undiscovered game development expert with an idea for a great Xbox 360 game, than Dream. Build. Play is definitely for you! Registration is now open and continues through May 17th 2011.

The Dream.Build.Play Challenge is back, and we’re more excited than ever to see your ideas come to life. Build the next mind-blowing game for Xbox 360^® using XNA Game Studio 4.0, and you could win the prize and fame! Set the power of your imagination free – and let the game challenge begin.
Learn more about the Challenge »

Students be sure to check out DreamSpark for all the development software you could possibly need. Oh and need I remind you that it is free!

Interesting Links 28 February 2011

2011-02-28T05:37:00.000-05:00

Lots of interesting posts by computer science teachers last week. And some news from various sources to share. But let’s start with the teacher blog posts.

Kathleen Weaver writes about her experiences with Programming for Windows Phone 7 for teachers and students. Kathleen has a couple of applications in the Windows Phone 7 app store already and is now introducing her students to Windows Phone development. Looks like fun. I can’t wait to see what her students come up with.

Interesting "find the max" project by Ben Chun (@benchun) There is some really good discussion in the comments about objects early or late and teaching the concepts in general.

Rob Miles (@robmiles ) posted an interesting Programming Puzzler. The useful part is the discussion in the comments. And I see that Rob did add more detail to the post itself since I originally read it. It’s a good discussion question.

My manager Bob Familiar helped Andrew Parsons with a multi-day game development camp at Pace University over the weekend. Bob wrote about it at Get your app on! Students learn XNA and Silverlight Gaming at Pace Game Camp They even has a 12 year old student there who was very successful. Seems like game development doesn’t have to start in high school let alone college. In more Windows Phone 7 development news, read about My School App: A First (Real) Windows Phone 7 App Project for Beginners. Mark Frydenberg of Bentley University has created and posted a fun and easy first Windows Phone 7 app project on the Microsoft Codeplex: http://myschoolapp.codeplex.com/.

The Microsoft Tech Student Twitter account (@MSTechStudent) has a reminder for us Visual Basic people about Visual Basic Windows Phone 7 Series: How to create a microphone application for Windows Phone 7 using Visual Basic.

Speaking of gaming news – did you hear that a Kinect for Windows SDK to Arrive Spring 2011? Designed for educational and research use by the good folks at Microsoft Research. What will your students do with it?

Under the heading of both fun and educational xkcd takes on the problem of address space http://xkcd.com/865/geek humor at its finest. A possible conversation starter as well.

And this video from the UK, Introducing Nellie the School Computer (1969) shows just what operating a school computer was like in the late 1960’s. You’ll like the way they teach how a binary adder works as well. Something to think about today.

In more Microsoft news, Microsoft now has local tech news sites for Silicon Valley, Boston, Chicago, and LA .

Last but not least, I see there is a Math 4.0 teacher guide out along with a bunch of other guides including one for Movie Maker that looks useful

FizzBuzz–A Programming Question

2011-02-23T11:34:00.001-05:00

Projects or exercises that lend themselves to many different “correct” solutions are just about the best sorts of learning experiences I can imagine. They really open the possibilities for discussion and from discussion – questions, answers, explanations – comes real learning. Recently Dennis Shaw, a student at Old Dominion University and a Microsoft Student Partner, told me about the FizzBizz exercise. (see Using FizzBuzz to Find Developers who Grok Coding for where it comes from) This is exactly that sort of multiple solution but not that difficult sort of exercise I love. Briefly stated the exercise is:

Write a program that prints the numbers from 1 to 100. But for multiples of three print “Fizz” instead of the number and for the multiples of five print “Buzz”. For numbers which are multiples of both three and five print “FizzBuzz”.

So there you have it. It involves using some sort of conditional of course. Nested or unnested? It can be done either way. Which way is best? Do you check for multiples of three first or five? Do you check to see if the number ISN’T one of those cases first or if it IS one of those cases? Or rather than If statements is there a different way completely? Perhaps a select/case structure? Does creating functions/methods complicate of simplify the result? If students know multiple programming languages is there one that is better for this than another (think especially about functional languages v. procedural languages). Are there special operators (like perhaps the ternary operator in C#, C/C++ and Java) that might make the code “tighter?” Is there a trade off between complication and understanding? Oh and of course, does your solution actually work?

Justify your answers. (Don’t you just just love the teacher-ness of “justify your answer?” ) I can see asking students to write up an explanation of how their solution works and why they did it that way as a means for forcing examination of the solution. And as a side benefit a lot of students can benefit from yet another writing exercise. Code that can’t be explained isn’t properly understood and that causes problems in the long run. A piece of code should not be “magic” to the person who wrote it.

There are many solutions on the Internet to the FizzBuzz question. So yes, some student might go searching for one and even try to use it. The “justify your solution” question means that they still have to understand and explain how it works and why they like it. I can’t see a student saying “I like this solution because I found it on the Internet and it works.” Well, I hope they wouldn’t try that. But if they do, grade them on how well they explain the benefits of using borrowed code and if they credited the original source properly. And of course they should also be able to explain why this solution is better than others they might have found. Surely they were not so lazy and to hand in the first solution they found?

BTW a couple of related posts of mine are Teaching, Learning and the Job Interview and Characteristics of a Good Programming Project

Triangle Shooter–An XNA Windows Phone Game By Kenny Spade

2011-02-15T05:57:00.000-05:00

Kenny Spade is a Microsoft Academic Developer Evangelist out in California who has been writing a series of blog posts that help one learn how to write a Windows Phone game using XNA. There is code, pictures, explanations of what is going on and lots of good information here. It doesn’t seem to be getting the attention it deserves so I thought I would pass a long some link love. The series so far is:

If you are interested in games for the Windows Phone, other XNA development for the Windows Phone or XNA in general give Kenny’s blog a look.

Making the Case for Becoming a Computer Science Teacher

2011-02-07T13:35:00.001-05:00

Mark Guzdial asks the question What’s the argument for becoming a computer science teacher? on his blog. It’s a good question. While as a former computer science teacher I may appear to be a strange one to make the case but I’m going to try. Being a computer science teacher is a great job. Really being a teacher in any subject is a great job and a lot of the reasons for teaching other subjects are part of teaching computer science. The student interaction, seeing students learn new and exciting things, and generally making a difference for good in the world. But there are of course some special things about teaching computer science that complicate the picture somewhat.

One is that if you are really qualified to teach computer science you are probably qualified to get a much better paying job in industry. If this is true, and generally it is, why take the lower paying teaching job?

Well besides the teacher benefits there is a certain amount of freedom to learn new things that one doesn’t always have in industry. In industry your learning can be channeled in certain directions by management. And with work hours in the computer industry often being as time consuming as those in teaching (trust me – I’ve done both) one doesn’t always have the time to learn about ones own interests. Computer science education is somewhat directed by the AP CS exam but that is only for one course. And while some teachers, by desire or necessity, focus all their courses around that one course many find the time and incentives to learn things in other directions. Game development for example using C# and XNA. Or more web development (perhaps using Expression Web with some free curriculum) In all of this, because of the nature of teaching, one can often focus on breath over depth. So rather than being confined to digging deeply into one of two technologies teachers can often dig lightly into a wide variety of technologies.

Of course this brings up the fact that some people are not excited about learning a lot of new technologies and having the curriculum change on a regular basis. I have no doubt at all that this is true. I have met teachers who are totally resistant to change and want to do the same thing year after year. To that I ask, do we really want people like that teaching (period – let alone computer science)?

The biggest problem is the law of supply and demand. There is not enough of a demand. Yes, NSF has a 10,000 computer science teacher effort but I don’t see much of a sign that the states or even school districts are buying this. If there were lots of advertisements for full-time computer science teachers we’d probably see more people looking at doing it. Many people don’t want to teach several sections of Math or history or English that they can teach one or two sections of computer science. This is widely true I think. We don’t make the jobs common enough or interesting enough (and by interesting I am not talking about money) for excited young people to move into the field of CS education.

When done correctly, allowing some teacher freedom to develop new curriculum for new technologies, availability of in-service training, providing support in both facilities and recruiting help (not hindrance) from guidance, teaching computer science to high school students is a really great job. It is a chance to start the next generation of world changing computer/computing scientists and industry professions with a solid base. It is a chance to work with smart kids who have a real passion for the subject. Why become a computer science teacher? It’s a fun job and a world changing job. If you love computer science it is even more fun than any other teaching job you can have.

Note: Take a look at Computing in the Core which is an effort to help get computer science adopted into the core curriculum in schools.

Ed Donahue Joins the Microsoft Academic Team

2011-01-16T23:42:00.001-05:00

Ed Donahue (her real name is Erin but she goes by Ed – go figure) has joined the Microsoft academic team as an academic developer evangelist for the Washington DC area. This apparently includes Maryland, Washington, D.C., Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. She’s a great person I first met through her involvement with the Imagine Cup. She and her team were twice US finalists in the software design competition.

Ed has a blog at Creepy Ed on MSDN – drop by and read what she has to say. She is also part of Ed and Ashley's 5 Minute Show which is a wonderful video blog with a lot of good interviews. She is on Twitter at @CreepyEd

My Most Read Posts of 2010

2011-01-01T15:04:00.001-05:00

For the most part I want to focus on the future and not the past. But I did want to take one look back at traffic to my computer science teacher blog over the course of 2010. I have rough metrics for both web traffic and RSS/subscriber traffic. I hope you will subscribe if you read blogs via RSS BTW. To subscribe to my blog please use http://feeds.feedburner.com/ComputerScienceTeacher as the RSS feed source. Subscribe now so you don’t miss any of the wheat among the chaff.

Controversy ruled and point of view posts with opinions topped the list of most read blog posts of 2010 based on Web-based traffic. Although my reviews of visual programming languages and discussion of Kodu (graphical programming for very young students) were also big hits. Confirming that both lists and free items are traffic draws my recent list of free ebook from Microsoft also made the list. Most of the top posts were from the last couple of months but one of them, a discussion of computer engineer Barbie was from last January.

The list of most read via RSS reader was almost completely different though. Here information and more pedagogical discussions ruled with a weekly interesting links post (Interesting Links 29 March 2010) toping the list. That was a surprise!

Interesting Links 29 March 2010 Some good links but I’m not sure what made it so widely read. I really do try to have good links in all of those weekly links posts though.
NCWIT Award for Aspirations in Computing This is a great program from NCWIT to recognize and support young women interested in computing careers. Looks like another site did help me get traffic here and for that I thank them.
Web Development or Computer Science What sorts of courses are schools calling computer science and is it helpful?
What are you using? Where I asked people which of the resources I blogged about they were using. http://www.jayscustomcomputers.com/ also sent RSS traffic here.
Playing Video Games Will Not Get You a Job But creating games might!
Cheating In Computer Science Classes How common is it? Is it worse than in other subjects?
Programming Contests – for good or for bad Everyone has an opinion. Do you use them?
Web 2.0 and Other Educational Resources From Microsoft
Rethinking Hello World One of my favorite posts of the year. I think we really do need to rethink the projects we assign. Closely related to this post was Projects that Mean Something and Characteristics of a Good Programming Project.
Starter Resources for Robotics Learning

I’m not sure what it means that the two lists are so very different. I know that the most web read post are largely because external sites with huge readerships linked to them. So I probably see a lot of one time traffic from people who are not in education. So while that is nice and it is exciting to have a post read by thousands of people from time to time my goal is to be helpful to computer science educators. That is not a goal that can be measured by readership numbers. Comments, either on a post or via email (alfredth@microsoft.com) or Twitter (@AlfredTwo) are always welcome to help me gauge that sort of success.

Microsoft bliink…a web design competition for high school students

2010-12-17T05:48:00.000-05:00

I’ve talked about Bliink in the past. (See bliink) Over the last couple of years Microsoft has run this web development competition in schools across the county. It’s been limited to individual states, state-wide organizations, or large school districts so far. This year we are going wider – national (US) in scope. My friend Gautam is running the program and blogged about it at his web site - Microsoft bliink…a web design competition for high school students

The goal of the Microsoft bliink contest is to build the student interest in technology and increasing the STEM pursuits in education and careers in the US. high school students with a positive experience with being creative with technology are more likely to pursue STEM studies and careers. We make this possible by providing high school students with the software tools, training and experiences through the Microsoft bliink contest.

Microsoft bliink contest 2011 will launch January 5th, 2011, with the registration window being open until February 28th, 2011. Website submissions (using Expression Studio software) are due March 1st, 2011 for fabulous prizes of XBox360 consoles, the new Kinect and XBox360 games. Any US high school student between 13 and 19 years of age is eligible to register and submit their websites to the Microsoft bliink 2011 contest, participating in teams of 2 – 4 students.

So visit Gautam’s blog for the full scoop and if you know students who are ready to show off what they know tell them to keep an eye out for the official January 5th 2011 launch.

Interesting Links Post December 6th 2010

2010-12-05T05:18:00.000-05:00

Well it is Computer Science Education week. Are you doing anything at your school for it this week? I attended three different CSTA chapter meetings in the last couple of weeks (northern New Jersey, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire) and there was a lot of talk about CS Ed week at all three meetings. Check out the CSEdWeek web page to see what is going on around the country. And now a few other interesting links.

The XNA Game Studio team announced Dream.Build.Play for 2011. While students should absolutely be entering the game division of the Imagine Cup Dream Build Play is open to everyone including people who develop software for a living. So you pros out there looking to make a name for yourself in game development this is the one for you.

Are you ready to compete? Dream.Build.Play is a competition where you can create and submit your XNA Game Studio 4.0 game for Xbox 360 to win prizes, including the chance to have your game featured on Xbox LIVE Arcade. Registration will open in late February 2011.

Speaking of the Imagine Cup, Andrew Parsons, recently relocated to New York City from Australian, makes the case Why [students] should make a game for Imagine Cup 2011

A thought provoking post on the CSTA blog Maybe Course Proliferation Is a Bad Idea? Could we possibly have too many computer science courses? Types of courses that is – not too many courses in too many schools. Check out the post and leave your thoughts over there.

Did you know that Microsoft has been ranked as one of the top corporate citizens. One of the reasons I am proud to work here. A lot of people seem surprised by this which tells me that Microsoft is not the company some people think they are. The article makes for an interesting read.

Are you using Visual Basic and thinking that the C# people are having all the fun with Smart Phone programming? Well, good news, Visual Basic Windows Phone 7 Developer tools is now available!

Computer Science Teacher Blog posts for November 2010

2010-11-30T06:02:00.000-05:00

My main blog is elsewhere so I thought I might try something new this month. What follows is an index to the blog posts I wrote during November at my primary blog. This way if you wind up here from a comment I have let you can see what I am really up to.

Pledge to Participate in and be a Supporter of Computer Science Education Week!

2010-11-16T20:53:00.001-05:00

Computer Science Education week is December 5-11, 2010 this year. ACM and the chair of CSed Week steering committer are asking people to sign up and pledge to support CSed Week. I understand that a new CSed Week web site “will be rolling out on November 29, and will encourage students, teachers, industry, and university folks to pledge to engage in some activity to promote computer science education.”

Join with teachers, students, parents and others who are participating in CSEdWeek activities and events. Sign the pledge now to support CSEdWeek activates and events.

Pledge here: <www.computinginthecore.org> and list what you are doing to participate in Computer Science Education Week.

Wisdom in Lists–Really?

2010-11-15T05:40:00.000-05:00

Like a lot of people I have an affection for lists that condense a lot of wisdom into a brief set of statements or items. Some time ago I wrote a series of posts on Programming Proverbs for example. That list (reproduced at the bottom of this post) came from a book that was every influential to me, especially early in my career. Each proverb by it self said a lot but mostly to someone who all ready know something about the topic. The original book had a sort of chapter on each proverb and did a wonderful job of elaboration and explanation. My series of blog posts was a couple of paragraphs on each from my own experience. Why do I bring tis up now? Well I found a couple of other posts of somewhat similar “proverbs” if you will. I thought I would share them with you and perhaps suggest a look at my own series in case you missed it the first time around.

The first is “The Two Things about Computer Programming” a couple of years old but still quite relevant. Plus it is new to me so maybe it is new to you as well. Read the whole post for the explanation of “Two Things” but the Two Things about Computer Science and the Two Things about Software Engineering given are:

Computer Programming:

Every problem can be solved by breaking it up into a series of smaller problems.
The computer will always do exactly what you tell it to.

Software Engineering:

Writing the code is the easy part. Writing it so someone else can understand it later is the important part.
Make it work, then make it elegant, then make it fast.

I’m not sure these are the end all and be all and I have a mind to explore them at some length one of these days. But I thought they were worth sharing in “raw form” to see if I can get some conversation going. Are these right? Are there two more important things? Is it even helpful to have the computer programming and software engineering divide?

The other post is 20/20: Top 20 Programming Lessons I've Learned in 20 Years subtitled “This post could be viewed as hard lessons learned for newly graduated college students, entry-level programmers, or advanced developers who just want a chuckle.” Also not a new post but I just discovered it. There are some 60+ comments which may add value as well. I like this list although, as with many such lists, I’m not sure all of them would be on my top 20. But then each individual has a different experience and a different idea of what key learning's are.

The Programming Proverbs I wrote about with a link to each post is here:

Welcoming Andrew Parsons to the US Academic Team

2010-10-25T07:01:00.000-04:00

The latest person to join the US Academic Developer Evangelist team is Andrew Parsons. Andrew is moving from the other side of the world (Australia) to work with colleges and universities around the New York City area. He’s been doing that sort of thin Down Under for several years and we’re all pretty excited to have him join the US team.

Andrew talks about the move on his blog at - NYC, here I come!

He also talks about his first big New York City event - NYC Imagine Cup Kick off - Inspiring students to change the world for the better - If you are a college/university student in the NYC area I hope you’ll sign up for Andrew’s event, learn about the Imagine Cup, and welcome him to the States. BTW Andrew is and has been one of the “captains” of the Imagine Cup Game competition so knows a ton about XNA and game development. And of course about the Imagine Cup!

Introducing the Microsoft US Academic Bloggers

2010-10-15T12:09:00.001-04:00

I'm part of a group of people at Microsoft who work with academics all across the country. A number of them have active blogs and I thought this might be a good time to introduce them to others. For each blogger I have their name which is hot linked to their blog, a picture, and a link or three to recent posts that I think people will be interested in. I hope you will visit some of these blogs, subscribe to any that look interesting and get some real value from them.

Bob Familiar is the Director of Academic Evangelism, DPE East Region.
Tara Walker is the Microsoft Academic Developer Evangelist [South East]
- The Cloud is Open: Windows Azure support for PHP Developer
- Windows Phone 7 Officially is Here: Ready, Set, Code!
Lindsay Lindstrom is the Microsoft Academic Developer Evangelist [Mid Atlantic]
- Why Choose Computer Science?
Edwin Guarin is the Microsoft Academic Developer Evangelist [New England]
- Windows Phone 7 developer resources from the Boston Developer Launch – start building cool apps now!
- Future Imagine Cup Winners? Fall Tour Part 1
Alfred Thompson is the Microsoft Academic Developer Evangelist [K-12 computer science US-wide]
Randy Guthrie is the Microsoft Academic Developer Evangelist [US-West]
- Using Self-Marketing to Maximize Out-of-Class Project Impact on your Resume
- Halo Reach Launch Party: Lone Tree, CO Microsoft Store
Sam Stokes is the Microsoft Academic Developer Evangelist [Southern California]
- Cloud technology is boring? Not if you are into BioInformatics
- This is a really cool panoramic stitching tool!
Dan Waters is the Microsoft Academic Developer Evangelist [Pacific Northwest]
- The benefit of student software competitions
- 3D Level Editing for Windows Phone 7 Games (#XNA)
Gautam Reddy is a senior Academic Marketing Manager based in Redmond WA.

Edwin Guarin Now Blogging

2010-10-11T10:48:00.001-04:00

My great friend Edwin Guarin (aka the Edvandelist) is now blogging at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/edvangelist/. Drop by and wish him well.

Interesting Links 27 September 2010

2010-09-26T18:29:00.000-04:00

Last week I wrote a post about the Imagine Cup. (Imagine Cup–Solving the Worlds Problems Through Software) A couple of things I should have mentioned about it though. One is there is a chance for students who enter to win an Xbox 360 console with the new Kinect each week to one random Imagine Cup registrant .Read the full rules at Imagine Cup Rules. The other thing I should have emphasized is that the Round 1 quizzes for the Information Technology (IT) Challenge have started. You can get the full schedule at IT Challenge web site. It’s not to early to work at qualifying for Round 2.

Brandon Watson @BrandonWatson announced that Visual Basic is now available to support Silverlight development for the WindowsPhone7. Visual Basic Comes to Windows Phone 7 As a big VB fan boy from way back this is pretty exciting to me.

The World Wide Innovative Forum is coming up this week in South Africa. Leading up to it Tony Franklin has been posting some guest posts from the US teachers who are going.

Gamer Girlz by Pat Yongpradit
Innovative Education Forum A Celebration of Learning and Culture by Cheryl Arnett and Rawya Shatila

@weemooseus Twittered a link to a post by a student who wrote up his list if the Top 5 AP Computer Science Tips. It’s an interesting list with some good suggestions.

What does your school need? The team at Bing is running a contest to provide money to schools. Check the program out here. Learn more about Bing programs for educators, visit bing.com/education

In other links, Ken Royal @kenroyal had an interesting article on Top 25 Ed Tech Trends. Well worth the read.

Most Popular Posts From August

2010-09-09T10:25:00.001-04:00

It turns out the be complicated to figure out what the most popular blog posts are for a particular month. There are two sets of data I look through. One set, from Feedburner, shows (in theory) the top number of posts read by subscribers to this blog. The second set of numbers, from the hosting service, shows (again in theory) the top posts as read by web browsers. There is a lot of similarity in the two lists but it is not exact. For one thing the web traffic comes in large part from search engines. It looks like a lot of people in August were searching for things related to “What do you do on the first day of class” which led them to a post from September 2007! My posts from July of this year on Visual Programming languages and the new Microsoft Technology Associate certifications also received a lot of web traffic in August. The top 5 based on being on both lists is below though.

I hope you’ll read through these if you missed them. Many of them have some comments which are often well worth the read. I encourage you to add your opinions to those and any other recent posts. And of course any I post in the future. Comments make it all much better for everyone. Are any of your favorite posts from August not on this list? Or any you think were worthless? I could always make a least popular list but somehow I think I would find that less personally satisfying.

Interesting Posts 30 August 2010

2010-08-29T17:04:00.000-04:00

One of the things I tell people when they ask me about why I came to work for Microsoft is that the company has grown up in many ways over the years. One of those ways is in giving back to the community both in general and education in specific. For example, last week it was announced that Microsoft Is Helping to Launch National Day of GiveCamp. What is Give Camp?

GiveCamp is a weekend-long event where software developers, designers, and database administrators donate their time to create custom software for non-profit organizations. This custom software could be a new website for the nonprofit organization, a small data-collection application to keep track of members, or a application for the Red Cross that automatically emails a blood donor three months after they’ve donated blood to remind them that they are now eligible to donate again. The only limitation is that the project should be scoped to be able to be completed in a weekend.

(Note you can follow Give Camp on Twitter @GiveCamp)

An education specific effort from Microsoft is called EduConnect. @Microsoft_EDU blogged about EduConnect on a blog post titled Microsoft giving back to schools via EduConnect. This is a program Microsoft has been building to help employees volunteer in and give aid to their own local schools. It’s been growing by leaps and bounds because a lot of Microsoft employees really want to help make education better were they life – and else where.

A Computer World article called 5 indispensable IT skills of the future has caused a lot of discussion among both educators and professional developers. Are these the right skills and what is the right way for students to get them to prepare for careers. And what does everyone not an IT professional need to know about IT skills?

Like Puzzles? Check out this new project from Microsoft’s @FUSELabs team http://www.teamcrossword.com/ Short version of what it is – a chance to work on a crossword puzzle with your friends no matter where in the world they are. Very cool. Also a great example of what cloud applications may look like in the future

NASA Announces High School Competition for Future Engineers: Design Software for Small Satellites on the Space Station. If you or students you know are interested in space based projects check this out. But do it soon as signups close in a couple of weeks. I have to hand it to NASA as they are really invested in educational programs.

The Microsoft Kodu team ran Kodu Kamp at Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond WA recently. There is a new blog post with lessons and pictures from the events. By all reports a great time was had by all. besides young students the event included some hands on time for teachers to learn about Kodu and its potential in the classroom.

My manager, Bob Familiar aka @bobfamiliar on twitter, blogged about Bullet Asylum - Missile Command on steroids for Windows Phone 7. The post includes a video trailer.

Microsoft Surface meets Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio at U. Mass Lowell. In a nice synergy of Microsoft tools the robotics program at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell uses hand gestures on a Surface device to control the operation of robots. (hat tip Microsoft Robotics Studio blog)

You can watch the video to see how smoothly it works. Visit the Robotics Lab web site for more information on work in progress.

Last week I wrote a post for the Educators’ Royal Treatment titled "Do We Need To Teach English In School?" In the article I posit that the arguments that we don’t need to teach computer science in schools to “Digital natives” apply just as well to teaching English to native English language speakers. Comments welcome and encouraged.

One final reminder, if you are using Twitter I hope you will follow me, Alfred Thompson at @AlfredTwo. I’d love to follow you back so send a tweet my way. Thanks.

Interesting Links Post 23 August 2010

2010-08-22T17:54:00.000-04:00

Happy Monday! Are you back to school yet? A lot of teachers are. If you are back I hope it is going well. If not yet, are you working out to get into “teaching shape?” The Principal’s Page had a post about that last week - Teacher Tired. Well in my attempt to be useful here is my weekly round up of interesting links I have found over the last week or so. I hope you find something helpful and/or interesting. I think this week’s selections are better than average.

Back to School: Making Sure Students with Disabilities Can See, Hear, and Use their PC Find out about a free guide that helps ensure that all students have equal access to learning with technology. Microsoft’s new Accessibility: A Guide for Educators

Some interesting things on Scratch this week. Hélène Martin (on Twitter @purplespatula) wrote a post about Scratch BYOB which lets you create higher order functions in a drag and drop environment. Why Build Your Own Blocks? Worth a read. Stacey Armstrong asks and answers Can Scratch be used to teach AP Computer Science topics? Stacey knows quite a bit about the APCS exam so I pay attention to what he says. Scratch and several other tools are highlighted in a post on the ReadWriteWeb called 4 Tools for Teaching Kids to Code. There are some quotes from me about why teaching computer science to K-12 students is important as well.

Students will be interested in the new Microsoft Facebook page for Technology students - http://www.facebook.com/MicrosoftTechStudent

Lindsay Lindstrom (@LindsayInPhilly) asks and answers Why choose computer science on a blog post.

Garth asks if we’re asking to few tech teachers to do too much? I think we probably are. Read CS and Teacher Education for more.

There is an official Small Basic Enthusiasts page on Facebook. Join today! Some interesting looking Small Basic tutorials at http://computerscienceforkids.com. Also Lynn Langit has been recording companion videos for here Small Basic Recipes at the Small Basic wiki.

Ready to start programming for Windows Phone 7? You can find the keyboard mappings for the Windows Phone 7 emulator at Keyboard Mapping for Windows Phone Emulator. You can also check out 12 hours of free video training on Windows Phone 7 development. Short on time? Take a look at Windows Phone 7 in 7 Minutes.

Microsoft Research Interns range from High School students to PhD candidates - Interns Bring Fresh Perspectives

Interesting Links 9 August 2010

2010-08-08T05:54:00.000-04:00

What a week. My son was married a week ago. I picked him and his bride up from their honeymoon last night. In between I took a trip to Texas for a Microsoft conference and celebrated my birthday while away. At least my bride was with me and I was able to meet up with my brother and sister in law who live in Texas. But a crazy week. I still managed to collect a few good links though. And if you didn’t see it I listed my 10 Most Popular Posts June and July 2010.

From Jean-Luc David (@jldavid) and others I found links to Bill Gates - In 5 Years The Best Education Will Come From The Web. I’m skeptical. There are too many people problems to work out. Plus I think that a lot of the best learning comes from people actually being together.

The Microsoft Accessibility web site has been rebuilt and reopened. They want everyone to know that accessible design can be beautiful. This is the first stop you should make if you have differently able students you want to help or if you want to teach students about accessible design.

Speaking of differently able people, @iRobotSPARK, lead me to this article called Robot Speaks the Language of Kids. Robots are being built and programmed to work with autistics students. Yet another example of computer science and engineering making a difference in the world.

From @MSTechStudent (follow them on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/Microsoft) If you need assistance in creating amazing games, here’s a XNA Game Studio 4.0 CTP & Education Roadmap.

Cy Khormaee recently blogged about high school computer science teacher Pat Yongpradit being selected to participate in the 2010 Microsoft Worldwide Innovative Education Forum in South Africa!

Related to that my new manager, Bob Familiar (@bobfamiliar) wrote about the Innovative Education program in the US at a post titled Exceptional Teachers Recognized at the Microsoft 2010 U.S. Innovative Education Forum

If you are interested in conferences at all, I made some random conference observations in a recent blog post on another blog.

Oh and Tara Walker from the US Academic team has started blogging again. Drop by Tara’s blog and see what she is sharing.

CyKho is back

2010-07-25T20:28:00.001-04:00

CyKho is back! Cy Khormaee has reopened his blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/cykho/ You can also follow Cy on twitter @CyKho though we need to get him twittering more.

Highlights of the Week ending July 17

2010-07-19T09:15:00.001-04:00

Most of my blogging goes on at other blogs. Last week I posted several at my main high school computer science blog and once at the Educators Royal Treatment. Here are the links.

Assessment and Trust (Educators Royal Treatment)

[Tavis Smilley] asked what was wrong with a plan that would get rid of the bottom 10% performing teachers in the city. The answer boiled down to the union and its teachers not trusting the principals and other administrators to be fair in their evaluation.

High School Computer Science Blog posts

Little Orphan Computer Science

The never ending debate over where Computer Science fits in the curriculum continues. Mark Guzdial asks why computer science is not in the latest set of STEM standards from the National Academes of Science ( What are we? Chopped liver? CS left out of...

Advice For An Imagine Cup Team

The following is a guest post by Pat Yongpradit. Pat is the computer science teacher at Springbrook High School in Silver Spring, Maryland . His students competed in this year’s Imagine Cup in the Game division and were one of the top 10 teams in the...

Microsoft Research Illuminates Mars in 3-D With WorldWide Telescope

Cool stuff for us space nuts. It’s a database project with a difference. Microsoft Research has joined with NASA to create a new 3D way to experience Mars. Press announcement at Microsoft Research Illuminates Night Sky and Mars in 3-D With WorldWide Telescope...

Interesting Links 12 July 2010

I’m up early this morning to take a flight out to California. I’ll be presenting at the annual CSTA CS & IT Symposium tomorrow. I’m very excited as I hear there is a full house expected. Since I was on the program committee (and highly honored to

Team USA Heads to Poland to Compete in the Imagine Cup

2010-07-02T08:58:00.001-04:00

Well the USA may be out of the World Cup but that’s not the only international competition going on these days. The Imagine Cup is a (some would say THE) major student technology competition in the world and the international finals are taking place in Warsaw, Poland. And the US is still in that. And represented by some truly outstanding young people from universities and even one high school.

Team USA, ably headed by Randy Guthrie (including Tom Ziegmann our Student Insider) is off to the Worldwide Finals starting, July 3rd to compete, collaborate and celebrate with students from 70 countries to solve the world’s toughest challenges with software- for all the action check: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/events/imaginecup/. The 2010 competition started with more than 325,000 high school and university students registering across more than 100 countries and regions. Among this elite group of students, there are 5 outstanding teams from the United States, which ties Taiwan and Brazil with the most teams representing their countries in the finals. Of course a personal favorite of mine is TEAM BEASTWARE who won the Windows Phone 7 “Rockstar” award from the US. You have to love a high school team who can hold their own against university students. If that doesn’t give you some hope about the US education system I don’t know what will!

Who are Team USA? Here’s an introduction to the teams who will be representing the United States in this final round:

1.TEAM MOBILIFE (Software Design) using Windows Phone: Kayvon Ghaffari, Wilson To, Helena Xu from University of California, Davis; University of California, Los Angeles; University of California, San Diego

The Mobilife project introduces innovative application technologies into the market of mobile medicine by pairing the widely-available Windows Mobile platform with computer-assisted intravital microscopy to provide on-field analysis of the human microcirculation to detect developing microangiopathy in children using a cellphone. This non-invasive, in-vivo procedure will provide doctors with information on a patient – enough to pre-diagnose different vascular diseases such as type-1 diabetes mellitus, pediatric hypertension, and sickle cell anemia. Mobilife’s technology offers a scientifically-validated approach that cost-effectively provides accurate microcirculatory information to diagnose vascular diseases in children. See a video of Team Mobilife’s project on the People’s Choice website.

· 2.TEAM VACCINE (Embedded Development): Patricia Day and Shawn McGhee from the University of Arkansas, Little Rock

· This project is aimed at helping children around the world. There is a potential to save tens of thousands (or more) children from preventable diseases by providing a mechanism to the World Health Organization, Unicef, Doctors Without Borders, Kenya Partnership, and others to allow for effectively recording/tracking of immunizations in remote regions of least developed and developing countries.

3. TEAM ONEVIEW (Touch and Tablet Accessibility): Shaun Kane and Kristen Shinohara from University of Washington

OneView is a Tablet PC-based application that enables students with varying abilities to collaboratively create, read, and edit diagrams. OneView provides a synchronized multimodal interface (visual, audio, text) that allows each student to use their preferred interface mode while collaborating with other students with different abilities. OneView enables pairs of students, either blind or sighted, to collaboratively view and edit diagrams. Using a single Tablet PC, a blind student can use an accessible audio interface, while her sighted collaborator uses a visual interface.

4.TEAM NOTE-TAKER (Touch and Tablet Accessibility): David Hayden and John Black from Arizona State University

Note-Taker is a portable, custom-designed hardware/software assistive device that improves the accessibility of higher education for students who are legally blind or have reduced vision. The Note-Taker Application allows low-vision users to view streaming video of a classroom presentation while, at the same time, taking notes in a split-screen interface with Microsoft OneNote. Much like their sighted peers, low-vision users can rapidly look between their notes and the board. Whereas fully students glance up or down, low-vision students using the Note-Taker need only move their gaze from one half of the display to the other. The Note-Taker Camera is a custom-designed USB camera that can be precisely pointed to any location where a whiteboard or digital projector might be located in a classroom, relative to the student desk. The camera provides 36x optical zoom and streams video to a tablet PC. Users can control camera positioning and zoom through intuitive tapping, dragging, and multitouch pinching gestures applied directly to the streaming video display. The Note-Taker Camera and Application has been used in class for more than 200 hours by students who are legally blind.

5. TEAM BEASTWARE (Windows Phone 7 “Rockstar”): Christian Hood and Eric Lo from the Advanced Technologies Academy high school in Nevada (also won our high school “Bliink” competition earlier this year)

The project is a 2D game that involves the player controlling a machine that destroys other machines by using the accelerometer. The objective of the game is to destroy as many enemies as possible before the health runs out. The player has three different actions they can perform which are shoot, repair, and defense. The shoot action fires bullets in the direction of the machine. The repair action restores a small amount of health instantly. The defense action reduces the amount of damage taken for a short period of time.

Critical Thinking

2010-06-18T11:30:00.001-04:00

Friday is not the day to talk about thinking. I think a lot of people in general and students in particular are looking to stop thinking right about now. But critical thinking skills are something I feel is really important so when I learned today that Microsoft has a bunch of resources for teaching critical thinking including a free e-book it seemed worth a blog post of its own. (Note that this is only the latest of a series of Teacher Guides for use in the classroom from Microsoft Education)

[Microsoft] developed this critical thinking and web research curriculum with the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE).

Lesson plans include prerequisites, rationale, essential concepts, and descriptions of related National Educational Technology Standards (NETS) and are designed for beginner, intermediate, or advanced levels, aimed at middle school and secondary students.

Students have more information at their fingertips than ever before, yet the challenge remains for them to find, evaluate, and apply the information they discover in the classroom and beyond.

Applying critical thinking skills through web research can help students:

Improve search skills.

Evaluate the information they find.

Incorporate them in their work.

Explore the ready-to-use curriculum below, including detailed lesson plans, student worksheets, and class demonstrations on:

Mechanics of searching

Validity and reliability

Plagiarism

Citing web sources

Civil discourse

Download the Critical Thinking e-book

Interesting Links 14 June 2010

2010-06-14T11:47:00.001-04:00

Is school done for the year where you are? Here in the northeast of the US there is another week or two to go. Teachers are finishing up the year, getting their grades done, graduation events are everywhere and I think many teachers are looking to take some time off before even thinking about next school year. Others though are planning their attendance at ISTE (Microsoft and me at ISTE), getting ready for summer workshops or otherwise thinking about how they will prepare for next year.

On the O’Reilly forms is this interesting discussion on teaching programming to kids The usual suspects (Kodu, Alice, Small Basic, Scratch) all come up.

Speaking of Small Basic - Small Basic 0.9 is out .Now supporting 15 different natural languages! Wow!

Here is a video that tells how to make your own movie with Windows Movie Maker by Joey deVilla and Junior. Kids will get a kick out of it. Maybe some summer project ideas for your own kids?

From Alex Courosa (@courosa) This link to a game for color nerds. The site shows the Hex code for a color and several color samples. Your job is to identify the color with its Hex code. Not so easy unless you are a real color nerd. Web developers will want to test themselves though.

From Sam Stokes (@SocalSam) a blog post on Silverlight games on Win Phone: Rotate that triangle,

Nice video demo of designing ideas with PowerPoint including photo editing and animation. Seriously the animation at the end is worth the trip!

Who says today’s youth can’t change the world? Vote for world’s best student project.

The IC2010 Windows Phone 7 Rock star award results are out! Gotta love it when a high school team beats out a bunch of college teams :-)

From @TechFTW: Check out what it’s like to be an intern at Microsoft with the My Life @ Microsoft video series http://dld.bz/gcHv

I love the blog post called Deeper Conversations by Doug Peterson (@dougpete) on how blog comments can lead to useful professional development. The comments are often the best and most useful part of any blog post. I know that people add a lot of value to my posts when they comment. If you have something to say, please say it! The conversation is what it is all about.

New URL

2010-06-10T13:45:00.001-04:00

My main blog, which has most of my posts, now has a new URL because of a migration. Please link to http://blogs.msdn.com/b/alfredth for my high school computer science education blog. Thanks.

Interesting Links 7 June 2010

2010-06-07T05:57:00.000-04:00

I tried to take most of last week off. Well I guess I actually did officially take most of the week off but somehow I spent more time than I should have on email and Twitter. Perhaps I have a problem. :-) But I didn’t really blog and I avoided most real work. I even made it to the beach for a while. So I feel somewhat rested. The rest of the month will be very busy with ISTE coming up as well as some local events in New England. I did Tweet and otherwise collect some interesting links to start your week off. So here they are.

Rob over @TeachTec has been reminding people that Microsoft will be having lots of activities at ISTE. Join our Hyatt sessions including. breakfast with a tour of Office 2010 & Web Apps Microsoft at ISTE for all the details. I really hope to see many of you there!

From the wonderful people at MIT who bring you Scratch (on Twitter @scratchteam) Scratch wiki: by and for Scratchers is now out. The Scratch wiki itself is at http://wiki.scratch.mit.edu/

From the official Microsoft twitter account a link to a video demonstration of new Windows Live Essentials features that make it easier to organize, connect and share online.

New on the Faculty Resource Center is a new XNA Lab in a Box This is a great getting started lab that was developed to train faculty in Europe. It’s in English BTW. :-)

New on the Dot Net Rocks internet program is an interview with Lynn Langit (@llangit) and Llewellyn Falco on teaching kids programming.

From Microsoft’s Internet Safety team (@Safer_Online) came a link to a great video on how to use Windows parental controls. I wonder how many people even know that Windows has parental controls?

Kathleen Weaver (@kathweaver) follows the @MSFTCrabby Twitter account and retweeted this link to - Crabby's Daily Tip: You can use Office for THAT? — Plan your wedding with Office Now when you think about it that has possibilities for combining teaching students about planning in general, about weddings in particular, and about using software to help with it all. I could have used this when I took “Marriage and the Family” in college. :-)

Interesting Links 31 May 2010

2010-05-31T05:13:00.000-04:00

It’s Memorial Day in the US and today we remember and honor the men and women who fought and died for our country. My Dad is a World War II veteran and has been relating some of his stories from that war. A lot went on and in his earlier days he never shared this much. I’m glad to know it and it really brings the sacrifices the military has made over the generations real to me.

Most people in the US have a holiday today and so do I. I wanted to keep to my usually blogging schedule though. So here now some updates and interesting links.

From the Kodu team via @mmaclaurin and @scoy6 I learn that there is a new build of Kodu out with PC updates. Information on their blog at PC build 1.0.48 is live! Get it here: Kodu Game Lab - Technical Preview

From Mark Drapeau (AKA @cheeky_geeky) Shuffleboard: A Windows Phone 7 Sample Game XNA based and a preview of an upcoming Coding 4 Fun article.

danah boyd (@zephoria) had an interesting post titled: Deception + fear + humiliation != education about an ACLU complaint regarding a police officer "safety" lesson) We need to teach students how to be safe on the Internet but we really need to make sure we are honest about it. And it can’t be all about fear and humiliation.

I really liked this post by Garth on his CS Education blog - Programmers need to [be] smart and stupid, at the same time. “I keep telling my kids if you are going to write code you have to design smart and code stupid” An interesting perspective on coding and design and getting the messages through to students.

From @innovativeteach and the UK Education team a new Blog Post - 'Bing - Visual Search, teaching questioning skills’

Don’t confuse visual search with image search, visual search is about finding information using images rather than a keyword. Bing has number of visual data collections, some of which are ideal for creating learning opportunities for pupils, especially in developing questioning and analytical skills.

To use Visual search, go to www.bing.com and click Visual Search on the menu on the left-hand side

My friend and go-worker Randy Guthre (@randyguthrie) wrote a new blog post: - Using Self-Marketing to Maximize Out-of-Class Project Impact on your Resume Out of class projects can be a very powerful in getting job interviews and actual jobs. Students can use social networking and other tools to leverage these projects to market themselves. Randy tells how it can work.

Plural Sight Online is offering their training at half off for educators on their Pluralsight On-Demand! .NET Training Courses. Plural Sight is one of the top training organizations. How good? Well Microsoft frequently hires them to train Microsoft employees. If you are interested visit their web site and contact their marketing people for details.

An interesting story on a blog post by Cameron Evans, the national technology officer and CTO for Microsoft Education in the US, called PowerPoint Inspires a High School Student to Computer Science This is the story of how one application was an inspiration to one person to enter the computer science field. Pretty cool story really.

RT @TeachTec is offering more Tech Tips to close-out the school year. See his post of the Top 8 tips

From @Safer_Online Who asks “Holding an online safety event? Microsoft offers FREE resources you can download and use.”

BTW I finally made someone's top 20 blog list - The Top 20 Teacher Blogs Apparently this and several dollars can get me a cup of coffee. If I drank coffee that is. :-) Still it always feels good to be noticed and there are some really great blogs on that list.

Interesting Links 17 May 2010

2010-05-17T04:51:00.000-04:00

I have quite an eclectic mix of links this week. Some career information, some Windows Phone programming links, Internet safety, school IT information and more. I hope you’ll read through it all and find something that is useful to you. If you are interested in more frequent update you can follow me at @AlfredTwo on Twitter. Send me an @ reply if you are on Twitter and read my blog so I will be sure to follow you back!

First a couple of IT and ICT links for you. I found this list of Worst practices in ICT use in education from a World Bank blog via the CSTA blog. Both the World Bank and CSTA posts are worth the read. Over at the Educators Royal Treatment, Ken Royal (@kenroyal) blogs a 7-Step District IT Checklist.

Some good news and some bad news about high school computer science. The good is a great program at Georgia Tech High called Operation Reboot: IT Professionals Become Computer Science Teachers. On the down side, Mark Guzdial writes about high school CS teachers under fire It is about how budget cuts and teacher layoffs are setting high school computer science back by pretty much removing it from the curriculum. It seems like HS CS takes one step forward and two steps backwards at a time when we really need some steady movement forward.

Speaking of the need – Two interesting salary reports came to my attention last week. On was Global Knowledge's 2010 IT Skills and Salary Report Download. Interesting that the average salary for respondents was $82,115. The other was a report on the 25 best-paying jobs for women. There was a gender gap in income – something that never stops amazing me as it makes little sense. On the good side the smallest gap wad for computer software engineers. Even nursing had a larger percentage gap between men and women with men making more.

The SaferOnline Team from Microsoft (@Safer_Online) Sent out a couple of useful links:

On the development software side of things, check out What's New in Visual Studio 2010

My friend Sam Stokes (@SocalSam) had a couple of blog posts last week about developing for Windows Phones.

Silverlight on the Windows Phone! (In both Chinese and English!)
Character Pink Girl? XNA 4.0? This could be your first Windows Phone Program

I also found and tried out a the windows phone snowflake demo game from the XNA Creators Club.

From the Teacher Tech blog and @TeachTec: Partners in Learning has a free site to set up communities. Join now and $1 goes to the Boys & Girls Club.

From the UK Innovative teachers program (@innovativeteach) “Want some great ideas of How to use Excel across the curriculum? Try our Innovids” I also blogged about that and other videos in my post last week on Programming and Excel.

BTW happy "Syttende Mai" to my friends and family in Norway. (It’s Norwegian Constitution Day)

Interesting Links 10 May 2010

2010-05-10T06:55:00.000-04:00

You have to love the Internet and especially twitter. You can hear about things that you’d never hear about from the main stream media. For example, from Andrew Parsons (@MrAndyPuppy) I learned that there is an official Geek/Nerd Pride Day - May 25: Geek/Nerd day Information and Geek/Nerd Day Facebook Page. Not sure I am a big fan of the list of rights and responsibilities on the Wikipedia page but it is an interesting idea none the less.

Looking at the network logs for links to this blog I found this list of the Top 50 Computer Science Blogs I’m pretty happy to have made this list. There are some good blogs on it but I really think there were some missing. Mark Guzdial’s Computer Science Education blog and Eugene Wallingford’s Knowing and Doing just to name two. There are several other good CS blogs in the blog roll on the side of this page (click to the blog if you are reading via RSS)

Speaking of other good blogs, Hélène Martin reminds us that while loops are more complicated than we sometimes remember with a post titled While loops gone wild. She talks about some of the things she does to teach indeterminate loops and what works or not at times.

A lot going on around the Internet on women in computer science last week. For example, from Derrick Love (@Dlove03) i spotted a link to a blog post titled Computer Science Lacks Women, Minorities. Dan Lewis on the CSTA Blog writes What's Different About Boys' and Girls' Interest in Computing? And Mark Guzdial writes about Women in CS in Qatar: It's Complicated. That last one is particularly full of surprises. If you are all interested in computer science perceptions in different cultures it is a must read.

Interested in contests? From @ScholasticTeach I learned that you can join the Partners in Learning Network by 6/30 for a chance to win a Dell computer lab for your school. Hey, it’s all free!

A bit about professional development and other events. From Liz Davis (@lizbdavis) I learned that there is a Creative Computing workshop for Middle & HS teachers at MIT. Looks like it is derived from the CS4HS curriculum plan developed initially at Carnegie Mellon. Should be a good program.

Liz also twittered about the Scratch at MIT Conference in August: http://events.scratch.mit.edu/conference/index.php/Scratch/2010 and Scratch Day on May 22nd. Registration is now open at http://sdmit.scratch.mit.edu/.

Speaking of Scratch – Gail Carmichael writes about Scratch and Eighth Graders on her blog. A good blog to follow BTW. Also she has some great links to resources including many that she used with her eight grade students. Worth the visit just for all those links.

From @Safer_Online I learned about some Free printable online safety brochures available for download. Take a look – you may have a use for them.

Last but not least, I have a new post at the Educator’s Royal Treatment today - Four T’s That Spell Trouble for Technology Adoption In which I talk about some of the issues that get in the way of implementing technology programs in schools.

Interesting Links 3 May 2010

2010-05-03T11:18:00.001-04:00

Last week was a struggle for me both blogging and otherwise. A lot of stuff going on at work and at home. Plus of course I spent a lot of my blogging energy on the Imagine Cup. I loved being at and blogging about the Imagine Cup though so it was worth it for me. I really hope a lot more top notch high school students give the IC a try next year. Hopefully we can come up with some ways to make that a but lighter weight for HS students though. The Windows Phone Rockstar award contest is still open to new entries BTW.

I have some longer single topic blog posts planned from this week but I do want to list some interesting shorts and links that I have found though. I hope you find some (even one maybe) that you can really use.

It's Teacher Appreciation Week - Thanks so much to all of you classroom teachers out there! In honor of this the TeachTech blog (ideas and resources for your classroom) is featuring guest posts from @TeachaKidd @EmergingEdTech @CoolCatTeacher @web20classroom @LarryFerlazzo

Monday, May 3: Lee Kolbert (@TeachaKidd), A GeekyMomma’s Blog
Tuesday, May 4: Vicki Davis (@CoolCatTeacher), The Cool Cat Teacher Blog
Wednesday, May 5: Kelly Walsh (@EmergingEdTech), Emerging EdTech
Thursday, May 6: Steven Anderson (@web20classroom), Blogging About the Web 2.0 Connected Classroom
Friday, May 7: Larry Ferlazzo (@LarryFerlazzo), Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

Speaking of teachers - Garth Flint (who comments frequently on my blog) has a new blog of his own called Garth's CS Education blog. One of his early posts is and Interesting review of a bunch of programming languages and their usefulness in first CS courses. I like his discussion of what makes up a good first programming language as well. So go read his blog and add it to your RSS reader or list of favorites. This is going to be a blog worth following. Trust me!

Next some contest stuff for teachers:

There has been some changes to the Submission form for 2010 Ypulse Totally Wired Teacher Award Sponsored by Dell. You may want to check that out.

If you are on Twitter you can follow @MouseMischief for a chance at winning a Mischief Classroom Kit.

Mouse Mischief integrates into Microsoft PowerPoint 2010 and Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007. See some videos at the Mouse Mischief blog.

Reason #1 to use Mouse Mischief in your classroom: “It actively engages students and supports collaborative learning.”
Reason #2 to use Mouse Mischief in your classroom: “Improves classroom management and overall student participation.”
Reason #3 to use Mouse Mischief in your classroom: “It’s familiar to use and easy on the classroom budget.”

We take humor very seriously here at Microsoft and think it is important in Education as well. See Microsoft's Guide to Humor which is one part of a “complete set of professional development competencies that we developed with educators for educators. Seriously.”

I’ve been saying that game design programs attract students and the Washington Post reports that it is working at George Mason. Anyone surprised?

From @Microsoft I find this post “Prepare today for jobs of tomorrow” on “The Hill” written by Microsoft’s Fred Humphries. It says that 75% of jobs in US in next decade will require some tech skills, but only 13% US adults have them. I do not think it is safe to assume that today’s students have them either!

Online safety stuff? I see that the Boy Scouts have added two gamer awards for Cub scouts. Hat tip to @MrAndyPuppy for the link.

And from @Safer_Online: Microsoft publishes its latest Security Intelligence Report. Some great insights there!

Fun video by Joey deVilla AKA @accordionguy Developer Jr. with Joey and Junior take a look at Kodu. Hat tip @shap for the link

Professional Development?

From @TeachTec: has new free Microsoft Teacher Leader Summer Workshops: Dallas, Irvine, Phoenix, Iowa
HS CS workshop on Alice at Texas A&M University – Corpus Christi
High School (AP) Computer science teachers workshop at Carnegie Mellon Highly recommended.

From @KidReporter and@DanKasun: Students see the forest through the tweets - Imagine Cup 2010 One last (for a while) Imagine Cup story

From @CACMmag End of an era? The end of something. Sony will stop making floppy disks by March 2011. Wait? Someone still makes floppy disks?

Interesting Links 28 April 2010

2010-04-28T15:41:00.001-04:00

As promised here are a bunch more links that I hope you will find interesting and useful.

The CSTA blog had a couple of recent posts of interest:

Lynn Langit (@llangit ) is a developer evangelist at Microsoft who has a passion for education as well. In a recent post she talks about Volunteering as a Comp Sci Teacher – How To It’s an interesting look at how to volunteer to teach and what it is like for a professional developer type to do it. Also check out her Teacher-for-a-Week post that tells the story of her recent experiences at the Girl’s Middle School.

I found a bunch of videos on new things in Office 2010 for teachers:

Looking at Windows 7? Highly recommended. If you are or if you have it check out 67 Windows 7 tips, tricks and secrets I found things I didn't know here. Some cool stuff!

I’m a big fan of FIRST Robotics. The regular season is over but I found this list of FIRST Robotics post-season events run by local teams. If you haven't been to one you should go and see one.

From @CapstoneEdu is an interesting looking conference event event May 6th in Cambridge, MA.

Capstone Partners and Microsoft are organizing an event to discuss the education landscape from K-12 to Post-Secondary and how technology will change the experience in the future. We will discuss challenges schools face in competing with online programs, business models that are emerging to improve education (not just test scores), and technologies that disrupt the status quo. Topics will include:

student retention

lecture capture

cloud computing & info security

tools & apps: wikis/ phones/tablets

online proctoring

open-source textbooks

learning management systems of the future

distance learning across borders

Register: http://bit.ly/a1sWJb They really need more real educators to show up and make sure they don’t go too far afield I think.

The @scratchteam has a new video with an overview of Scratch 2.0.

Don’t have enough time for social media? You may find this post that answer the question How Do Busy Leaders Find Time for Social Media? interesting. It was written by Michael Hyatt (@MichaelHyatt) who is the CEO of a major publishing company. And related to that Doug Peterson asks about teacher’s online footprints at 404 Educator. What do people find when they search for you

Interesting Links 27 April 2010

2010-04-27T18:27:00.001-04:00

I twittered up quite a storm last week. Much of it was because of the US Imagine Cup which I was also blogging a lot about. I was also putting updates on the Microsoft Facebook account. The Imagine Cup was flat out busy but much fun and much excitement for me as well as all involved. I did find a bunch of useful links to share though. I apologize for them being so late this week but, well, I was busy.

First a couple of Imagine Cup links to highlight:

U.S. Imagine Cup Winners Celebrate Victory, Share Inspiration with James Cameron and Craig Mundie from Microsoft Presspass.
Bill Gates blogs about the Imagine Cup which is one of his favorite events.
Team members, mentors, a mom share their experiences on the U.S. Imagine Cup Finals Videos from the Virtual Press Room for the US Imagine Cup
High School Team Makes Mark at Imagine Cup from the Official Microsoft Blog
Video interviews with Imagine Cup teams by Pat Godwin, Microsoft Student Insider

Looking for girls in technology? One of the very interesting people I met at the US Imagine Cup was Genevieve L'Esperance Geek girl and video blogger. Gen is a teenager from Montreal, Quebec. Gen has a bunch of video posts and interviews on her blog GenINC.

Garth Flint has an interesting review of of programming languages and their usefulness in first CS courses. You may also find his discussion about what makes a good first programming language to be interesting as well. Garth’s blog is new but its off to a great start. I recommend subscribing.

A couple of workshops to recommend. There will be a workshop on Alice at Texas A&M University – Corpus Christi in June. And a High School (AP) Computer science teachers workshop at Carnegie Mellon Judith Hromcik is one of the presenters at CMU. I’ve known Judy for years and there are few people who know more about AP CS than she does.

I’ve got still more to write up but they’re going to have to wait for tomorrow.

Windows Phone 7 Rockstar Award

2010-04-25T13:39:00.001-04:00

If you have been reading my blog (or following on Twitter @AlfredTwo) you have been reading about the US Imagine Cup finals. Hopefully you have found some interesting things and maybe becoming interested in getting involved if you are a student or presenting the idea to your students. If so I want you to know that there are some events in the worldwide Imagine Cup that are still open to entries. One of the events that excites me the most is the Windows Phone 7 Rockstar Award.

To win the Windows Phone 7 “Rockstar” Award, your team is challenged to create a Windows Phone 7 application (app) in either Silverlight or XNA Game Studio. This app needs to be designed with the consumer in mind and should be as visually compelling as possible. Be prepared to demonstrate your team’s app entry running on an actual Windows Phone 7 device or in an emulator. Mobile applications are “all the” buzz today. Windows Phone 7 is a revolutionary new platform and you have the opportunity to be a part of it. This is your chance to think of something that is truly outside the box and be one of the first developers, ever, to be building apps for Windows Phone 7. Create an app that people will love having on their Windows Phone.

And of course there are prizes!

First Prize: $8,000 USD, a trip to the Worldwide Finals in Warsaw, Poland from July 3-8, 2010, and a Windows Phone for each team member.
Second Prize: $4,000 USD and a Windows Phone for each team member
Third Prize: $3,000 USD and a Windows Phone for each team member

Get full information about the competition at the Windows Phone 7 Rockstar Award site. BTW DreamSpark has partnered with Windows Marketplace for Mobile so you can sell your mobile applications! Go to DreamSpark to learn more!

US Imagine Cup Finals This Weekend

2010-04-22T07:29:00.001-04:00

Today I have a presentation to give around mid-day and then I go home to pack for a trip to Washington DC for the US finals of the Imagine Cup. Ironically last year’s finals was in near by Boston/Cambridge but I had to miss it to attend a meeting in, you guessed it, Washington DC. This year I get to go. We’ll see the selection of the top Software Development Invitational team who will get to go to the world wide Imagine Cup finals in Poland this summer. We will also pick the best (of the 10 finalists) in the US game development addition. Some of those teams are moving through the final rounds of the world wide competition which is running in parallel. Yeah, its different.

There is also a people’s choice voting for the Software design category. Visit the People’s Choice Video Gallery and vote for your favorite. Next Monday we will be running a community showcase April 26, 2010 from 9:00 AM – 2:00 PM, at the Newseum in DC. Read about the Imagine Cup community showcase here and please come by if you are in the neighborhood! I’m really excited to see the Newseum BTW. From all I have read and heard it sounds like a very interesting place.

I’ll be twittering a bit – we’re using the hash tag #ICUS10 for US Imagine Cup related tweets. Several others should be tweeting as well. I’ll be posting updates on Facebook and I plan on blogging news here at the end of the day. So I may not have a post Friday because of travel (but I may – we’ll see) but you should see posts on Saturday and Sunday with a wrap up on Monday.

Technorati Tags: Imagine Cup,ICUS10,IC10,USIC,USIC10

New Silverlight 4 Training Kit Available

2010-04-21T06:00:00.000-04:00

Microsoft has just released a new free Silverlight 4 Training Kit that walks you through building business applications with Silverlight 4. You can also download the entire offline version of the kit here. You can use the 8 modules, 25 videos, and several hands on labs online or offline from links on the Channel 9 site.

The key to this training material is not the features it covers (though it covers a variety them) but rather that it teaches from the perspective of building a business application.

The Silverlight 4 Training Course includes a whitepaper that explains all of the new Silverlight 4 features, several hands-on-labs that explain the features, and a 8 unit course for building business applications with Silverlight 4. The business applications course includes 8 modules with extensive hands on labs as well as 25 accompanying videos that walk you through key aspects of building a business application with Silverlight. Key aspects in this course are working with numerous sandboxed and elevated out of browser features, the new RichTextBox control, implicit styling, webcam, drag and drop, multi touch, validation, authentication, MEF, WCF RIA Services, right mouse click, and much more!

It really expects some previous knowledge of Silverlight but I’m going to give it a whirl myself anyway.

Teachers Don’t Talk Enough

2010-04-15T10:51:00.001-04:00

I was invited to be on a panel at Northeastern University (I was a last minute fill-in but happy to attend) talking about Teaching With Technology. Now the difference between teaching technology and teaching with technology is a big one. And important one. I’m big on both but honestly think that teaching with technology is a better way to teach technology than teaching technology for its own sake. The panel was taking and discussion questions based in large part on the keynote presentation by Don Marinelli from Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center which Don co-founded with the late Randy Pausch.

We had an hour scheduled for the discussion but we could have gone for hours. Really hours without repeating or running out of questions and discussion topics. The discussion was lively and, for me at least, very engaging. I see this with just about any panel I attend either in the audience or as a panelist. I also see “more time to network and talk with colleagues” as a major bit of feedback for most of the educational conferences I am aware of. If you’ve been to some of the major edtech conferences (TCEA and ISTE for example) you will see long conversations in the halls, outside the meeting rooms, at blogger cafe’s and just about any free space. People blog and twitter about these conversations being the best part about some conferences.

Why? Because teachers just don’t have enough time to talk with their peers in their daily work lives. Yet talking with ones peers is a wonderful way to learn new things, share ideas, ask weird but useful questions, and generally develop oneself as a person and as a professional. But teachers are locked up isolated in their classrooms most of the day. faculty lounges while occasionally helpful have limitations. Too little time in them for one thing. Too many other things going on it them. And all too often a slightly toxic atmosphere in the schools that could most benefit for helpful learning.

So what to do? I recommend blogging and twitter. Yes you have heard this from me before (well unless you are new to my blog. :-)) If you are looking for a more scholarly set of reasoning check out Rationalizing Academic Blogging by Mark Guzdial who is a tenured professor at Georgia Tech. Start with reading them and adding your input to the discussions. Really the comments are often the very best part of a blog post – especially with this blog. Then think about writing your own blog. You know stuff or you wouldn’t be a teacher – share it with others. Come on and join the conversations. You know you want to!

Michelle Hutton of the CSTA posted a good blog roll at the CSTA blog. You are following the CSTA blog right? For teachers in all areas there is a great list of blogs at the Moving Forward wiki. Start with Education blogs by Discipline and when you create your blog make sure you add it to the list.

BTW I have just updated my personal blog roll on my primary blog. The CS Teacher list includes:

Mark Guzdial – Computing Education Blog

Wicked Teacher of the West

Leigh Ann Sudol - In Need of a Base Case

Kathleen Weaver - Teaching CS in Dallas

Eugene Wallingford – Knowing and Doing

Ben Chun – And yet it moves

Stacey Armstrong - A+ Computer Science

Brian Scarbeau - A high school CS teacher in Florida

Mr. Higgins Blog (who I need to bug to update more often :-) )

Yes this is another repost but I really think these blogs deserve more link love and attention from search engines. And from you to.

Visual Studio 2010 Now Available

2010-04-13T04:44:00.000-04:00

Well it is official – the final release of Visual Studio 2010 is not available. If your school has an MSDN AA account you can download it from ELMS now. If you don’t have MSDN AA, why not? Also for students who are part of the DreamSpark program you can download Visual Studio 2010 from there as well!

For everyone, the Express editions are also now available as free downloads/net installs from the Visual Studio Express Editions web site.

For those of you working at schools, including high school, colleges and universities, that have MSDN AA memberships Hilary Pike posts detailed steps for how to access Visual 2010 in MSDN AA, DreamSpark, and MSDN AA ELMS:

Visual Studio 2010 RTM and .NET 4.0 now available through DreamSpark, MSDN, MSDN AA, and TechNet

MSDN AA Admins Enable Visual Studio 2010 Downloads from ELMS

Interesting Links 12 April 2010

2010-04-12T04:35:00.000-04:00

What does this say?

01000010 01100001 01110010
01100010 01101001 01100101

It says “Barbie” in Binary coded ASCII. See Barbie Goes Binary for more on the display on Computer Engineer Barbie's laptop and the design on her blouse. I wonder how many little girls will notice? Well at least we geeks know it is there.

The nice people at @fuselabs retweeted this link from @planetkodu about an interesting post from the Planet Kodu Blog: 6 surprising ways Kodu can help you. If you have looked at Kodu and wondered what it would do for students that post is a great place to start reading.

The @koduteam twittered about some little-known-facts on Kodu cut-and-paste (keyboard shortcuts work!) By retweeting a link from @scoy6 to his new Kodu tutorial on programming User Interface on the Kodu blog.

Speaking of research projects that are useful for teachers, Microsoft Research just released a new Chemistry add-on for Word.

The Chemistry Add-in for Word makes it easier to insert and modify chemical information, such as labels, formulas, and 2-D depictions, within Microsoft Office Word. Additionally, it enables the creation of inline “chemical zones,” the rendering of print-ready visual depictions of chemical structures, and the ability to store and expose chemical information in a semantically rich manner.

Joe Osborne, one of Microsoft’s Student Insiders (Twitter @joeosborne87) Twittered a link to his interview with Twitter's Raffi Krikorian. One of the things they talked about is geotagging. Information of where people are is becoming quite the issue on the Internet these days.

Last week I started guest blogging at the Educators’ Royal Treatment. I expect to blog there a couple of times a week, usually about general education technology issues rather than computer science specific topics. My first post there is called The Missing Question From Technology Plans I hope you will check it out and comment as appropriate.

Looking for Alice teaching workshops this summer? Good list at http://www.aliceprogramming.net/workshop2010.html (The Alice home page is at Alice.org)

Are you a Moodle user? @mrdatahs wrote a post on ZDNet Education about Microsoft Education Labs integrates Office with Moodle. This is one of a number of releases by Microsoft Education Labs and it is not the only resource for Moodle users that you will find there.

Are you one of those people who likes to incorporate photos and videos in Office documents? @Officegal twittered about new photo and video tools in Office 2010 on The Microsoft Office Blog.

The Microsoft Jobs Blog interviews Microsoft Games Studio Writer John Sutherland - from Pong to Natal. An interesting story about one man reinventing himself and moving into new career options. Worth a look and not just if you are interested in game development.

Interesting Links 29 March 2010

2010-03-29T04:33:00.000-04:00

In yet another example of how poorly I do at predicting what is going to be interesting and/or controversial almost no one read and absolutely no one commented on my post about companies getting involved in curriculum writing last week (Curriculum, Companies, Cooperation and Conflict). My asking of the question Where does Computer Science Belong? did a little better with some interesting comments. I recommend the comments at least.

Related to that last post and question, Cameron Wilson of ACM wrote a post called Computing and the Common Core that you should read. The most important part of it is his call to action.

Now the community can support this breakthrough by sending letters for support for the inclusion of computer science in the final document. The initiative is taking comments on the draft until April 2. There are two ways to comment. The first is by taking the survey, which as an additional comment area where you can express support for computer science. (Follow this link and click on the "submit feedback" to get to the survey.) The second is by sending letters to commonstandards@ccsso.org.

Interested is seeing some good college/university projects? The US Imagine Cup finals have opened up their People's Choice – Video Gallery. Watch the videos and vote for your favorite team. Send your friends and students over as well. This will give you a good idea of what the Imagine Cup is all about. And perhaps inspire some students to enter this global competition going forward. It’s amazing.

Concerned about accessibility and how it relates to educating your students? From the UK Higher Education blog:

We’ve just issued the third edition of our accessibility guide for education, and it’s available as a download from our accessibility site. The site also includes a number of accessibility video case studies.

The Accessibility: A Guide for Educators has been updated to include information on Windows 7 accessibility features, and current assistive technology product recommendations.

Rob Miles (@robmiles) has posted some XNA videos at http://verysillygames.com/Screencasts Rob also has a blog post on Windows Phone Accelerometer Support in XNA that you may be interested in.

Are you planning for Office 2010? Have you downloaded the free beta? There is not a free e-book available called First Look at Office 2010. Get yours now?

Speaking of Office there are some interesting downloads that will be interesting to many teachers. There is a brand new Chemistry add-in for Microsoft Word at http://www.educationlabs.com/projects/ChemistryAdd-in/Pages/default.aspx There is also a math add-on for Word at the download center and math worksheet generator at Microsoft Education Labs.

Over at ZDnet Mary Jo Foley (@maryjofoley) kicked off a new blog post series last week - Microsoft Women Worth Watching. Day 1: Julie Larson-Green. Day 2 was Betsy Aoki: Microsoft Women Worth Watching.

Intel has some videos about intelligent devices - with Intel chips inside of course :-)

Rob Bayuk (@TeachTec) has been blogging and Twittering Office how-to tips including - Add sounds, movies, and animated pictures to your PowerPoint presentations. For more like that follow the Teacher Tech blog.

From the ACM SIGCSE mailing list (I think) I found this great collection of programming assignments in Python. I can see these easily adapted to other programming languages though.

Playing Video Games Will Not Get You a Job But Creating One Might

2010-03-27T09:30:00.001-04:00

Last week I had a chance to hear Larry Hryb (AKA Major Nelson) of the Xbox Live team talk to a group of college students at Microsoft’s Cambridge (MA) facility. The audience was made up mostly of students with aspirations of making it in the gaming industry. Game programmers, graphic designers, game developers, game audio enthusiasts, and more. Larry talked about Xbox Live and Xbox specific topics for a while and then joined a panel of people in the game industry that included someone from Linden Labs (Second Life) and some independent game companies. They talked about careers in the industry. Obviously one of the things students wanted to know was what they need to do to get into the industry. One of Larry’s kick off comments was most interesting. Basically he said (I’m paraphrasing) was “I don’t care what games you play, how much you plan, or how good you play. I hear that all the time. Tell me what you have created.”

There is a huge difference between being a consumer and being a creator. Being good at one does not mean you will be good at the other. A video game company and in fact any software company is looking for people who can create. Several people on the game industry panel said they wanted to see code from potential developers. Art from potential game graphic artists. Potential game designers who are not also programmers (and there are places for those people) can create board games to show off their talents and imagination. The important thing is to show of what you can create. It doesn’t matter where you get or create your portfolio but that you have one. One independent game developer whose games are making him money on Xbox Market said to get a hold of XNA and create a game to demo. Maybe even get it on Xbox Market and have some evidence that you can create marketable products.

This idea of having a creation to show goes beyond just games though. An interview for just about any entry level software job is going to cover what you do beyond your course work. Everyone expects you to do well in your course work and to get good grades but what they want to know is what you do outside of class. Do you create interesting projects? Do you take your own ideas and express them in code? You may talk about wanting to change the world but what steps are you doing to actually make a difference?

Yes internships can help with this. But not everyone can get a great internship. Everyone can get development software and create software that can make a difference for themselves and perhaps even the world. Microsoft has programs like MSDN Academic Alliance (your school may already be a member) and DreamSpark that gives departments and students professional software for their use. Dreamspark is completely free for students as well!

There are competitions like the Imagine Cup where students create teams and compete internationally. Over the past few years many students have used their projects as portfolio projects or even to launch their own businesses. You can see what some of this year’s projects look like and vote for your favorite at the US Imagine Cup People’s Choice Video Gallery. Oh and there are several types of competitions in the Imagine Cup including a Game Design competition. If you don’t think that winning a major international development competition impresses prospective employers think again. Be thinking about entering next year!

Windows Phone 7 Series Programming

2010-03-16T06:07:00.000-04:00

Programming phones seems to be the hot new thing these days. Yesterday Microsoft announced the availability of free programming tools for the new Windows Phone 7 Series of devices. Start with Visual Studio 2010 Express for Phone beta.

Windows Phone Developer Tools includes:

Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone

Windows Phone Emulator

Silverlight for Windows Phone

XNA Game Studio 4.0 CTP

I’ve got the complete set and am installing it today. With the Windows Phone Emulator I can get some code developed even before the phones themselves become available. I’m just trying to figure out want to create.

Need some documentation? Charles Petzold's preview ebook Programming Windows Phone 7 Series is now available online at http://charlespetzold.com/phone/index.html.

How about Code Samples for Windows Phone? There are some of those as well. And don’t miss out on the Windows Phone 7 Series Developer Training Kit!

NASA Be A Martian Pathfinder Innovation Challenge

2010-02-26T17:33:00.001-05:00

Back last November I posted a short link to NASA’s Be A Martian program page. I guess I didn’t realize at the time that there was a programming competition called the Pathfinder Innovation Challenge as part of that. Not strictly a student competition but many may be interested in it. Here is the reminder announcement I received in my email today.

NASA has hundreds of thousands of images from their missions to Mars. With the Pathfinder Innovation Challenge, they want to enlist your coding skills to help them classify them. This is a unique opportunity where you can help NASA and win some great prizes by utilizing your existing .NET skills.

The Pathfinder Innovation Challenge consists of four different “leagues”. In the Global Cooperation League, you’ll build casual games that will allow every day citizens to help classify images in a game environment (similar to the counting craters application that can be found online here – http://beamartian.jpl.nasa.gov/maproom) and do so using Silverlight and NASAs Azure-hosted APIs in codename Dallas. In the Intelligence League, you’ll use the power of the Azure cloud to attempt to solve the same problem by programmatically examining and classifying the images.

Full details for the competition can be found on their website at http://beamartian.jpl.nasa.gov/pic . Details specific to the Global Cooperation League at http://beamartian.jpl.nasa.gov/pic/coop-league and details for the Intelligence League can be found at http://beamartian.jpl.nasa.gov/pic/intelligence-league . Also be sure to check out the intelligence league site for a series of “How Do I?” videos that show how to sign up for an use the Codename Dallas API.

In addition to helping mankind and being able to brag that your code was helping NASA, PIC winners will also win amazing prizes ranging from NASA swag, to ZuneHDs, to trips to see the launch of the next Mars Rover.

Students to Business Career Streams

2010-02-25T06:04:00.000-05:00

Microsoft is doing a number of things to help people enter and grow in technology careers. Yesterday there was a post on Microsoft On The Issues called Microsoft Bolsters Efforts to Create More Opportunity for College Grads about some of those things. But there is also a program called Students 2 Business that I would like to highlight today. Specifically the new Career Streams site.

Do you know there are great technical careers out there waiting for you? Have you ever wondered…

What do people in these careers do?
What skills are needed to get started?
How do you get experience?
Are there jobs if you have the skills?

Learn about the skills that employers seek and relevant experience to land the job through Microsoft S2B Career Streams. Career Streams will introduce you to a variety of technical careers that are in demand today and tomorrow in the Microsoft community. It will help you learn the skills needed to get started in a technical career and offer opportunities to gain that vital first work experience. Career Streams guide you through three stages of training:

Learn – about technical careers including a video of a professional in the field and an overview of the Microsoft tools and technologies necessary to enter the field.
Skill – complete introductory training to develop skills via webcasts and online resources.
Do – Practice the skills learned to create some “refrigerator art” and develop portfolio assets

Once you complete a career stream, employers can find you through Students to Business as the career stream will automatically populate your online portfolio – searchable by employers. Career Streams available today include: Web Developer, Web Designer, IT Security Specialist, Server Administrator, Network Specialist.

Register Today. Microsoft S2B Career Streams are FREE for students. All you need to do is register at http://s2b.experience.com/alumnus/career_streams and to begin your career!

Small Basic is Moving And Other Resources

2010-02-24T05:07:00.000-05:00

Small Basic is not part of the Beginning Developer Learning Center. Looks like the whole landing page for the BDLC has been updated as well. Check out the Kids’s Corner for links for:

New Small Basic Links:

· Links page: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/beginner/cc979165.aspx

· New Small Basic home page: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/beginner/ff384126.aspx

· New Small Basic FAQ page: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/beginner/ff384239.aspx

· New Small Basic International Links page: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/beginner/ff423682.aspx

Interesting Links 8 February 2010

2010-02-08T05:59:00.000-05:00

Well did you watch the Super Bowl? I confess that I did not. I’m just not that into football. Still I had a good weekend and as usual I have spent some time looking though my Twitter feed of the last week for interesting things to share. I hope some of you are finding this useful or interesting. It’s serving as a good way for me to track things and record useful (to me) information. And now this weeks list.

Details for this year’s CSIT Symposium details have been released. I’ll be in California this Saturday meeting with the rest of the planning committee as we work out still more details but you can register now. I hope you’ll come. It will be at Google HQ. I think they are an Internet advertising company of some sorts. Doug Peterson (@DougPete) who is one of my favorite people to follow on Twitter is also on the planning committee BTW. So Canada is represented. :-)

@TeachTec sent out this link to a Project Natal video that explains how yesterday’s STEM students are today’s creative wizards. It was created as part of the Connect A Million Minds project which is a Time Warner Cable effort in conjunction with FIRST Robotics and CSAS - The Coalition for Science After School.

Also from @TeachTec - Getting kids to tell their stories and the free teacher's guide to digital storytelling. Share this with a lot of other teachers you know. English/language arts, social studies, you name it.

The @innovativeteach Twitter account linked to a blog post on their site called AutoCollage - a simple workshop Included in the post is information on how teachers can get AutoCollage for free.

The CSTA Blog had an interesting post called Getting Students to Test Their Programs This seems to be a big problem with some students. They are either unwilling or find themselves unable to really test their programs. Do you see this problem? How do you deal with it?

The CACM blog also has some interesting posts last week. One in particular got to me School pupils' attitudes to programming: "what's that?" How many students stay away from programming because they don’t know what it is? How about students who decide to major in computer science while being clueless about programming? How can we fix that?

Alerted by @blogCACM on Twitter I found this Bruce Schneier & Marcus Ranum point/counterpoint: "Should we ban anonymity on the Internet?" They spent a little more time just debating if banning anonymity on the Internet is possible than on if it is the right thing to do. But both make interesting discussion topics. Dealing with ethics in computer science in your classroom? If so this may make a great item to talk about.

The @iRobotSPARK account alerted me to both the @roboweek account and to the First annual National Robotics Week which has been announced 4/10-4/18 Besides that article which lists some events already scheduled look up the National Robotics Week home page.

New Learning Resources on the Visual Basic Developer Center (thanks to Beth Massi on the Visual Basic Team Blog)

Today we revamped some of the Visual Basic Developer Center Learn pages with more content that allows you to pivot on more fine-grained topics and tasks related to Visual Basic programming. We’ve started with the Introductory Topics and Language Syntax pages. To get there, head to http://msdn.com/vbasic and then click the Learn tab. There you will see a set of general topic areas to explore.

The US Imagine Cup Twitter @imaginecupus retweeted a message by @LouisIngenthron with a link to a post that shows you how to create a simple endless ocean for an XNA C# game. Just one of the latest posts at Coding 4 Fun.

Today we are announcing the winners of the first U.S. Kodu Cup. It’s a competition that challenged kids across the United States (from the age of 9 to 17) to use Kodu – a free game development tool from Microsoft – to create their own video game for the chance to win great prizes and the chance to attend the Imagine Cup World finals in New York City in July.
Kodu was created by FUSE labs in Microsoft Research to help children learn how to use computers while developing useful skills such as problem solving, creative thinking and planning in a fun, engaging and creative way. Kodu is proving to be a great took for fostering children’s interest in exploring a career in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM).

Computer Science Teacher

No Room in the Inn–I Mean Schedule

Top Most Read Posts of 2011

Interesting links 11 December 2011

Why I’m Still Excited about Computer Science

Interesting Links 13 November 2011

Interesting Links 7 November 2011

Writing My ISTE Keynote

Interesting Links Post 31 October 2011

Interesting Links 17 October 2011

When Fish Fly

Interesting Links 20 September 2011

Microsoft East Region Bloggers

What is an app?

Interesting Links September 6 2011

Interesting Links 29 August 2011

Interesting Links 20 August 2011

Ready or Not–New School Year About To Start

Windows Phone Development Training Online

“Mango” Jump Start! Aug. 23-24! Pass it on…

Innovative Education Forum–Judging Day

Are your students entered in the Windows Phone app contest

Interesting Links 5 July 2011

Interesting Links 20 June 2011

Share Kodu Cup Winners Announced

A Collection of Good Posts

Imagine Cup Game Design Competitors 2011

Interesting Links Post 31 May 2011

Imagine Cup WorldWide Game Competition Finalists 2011

I grabbed some of the information about the US teams in the finals but you’ll want to take a look at all the other competitors in all three categories.

Team Name: ICsquared

Game Name: Embryonic

Country: United States

Team Name: Team Dragon

Game Name: Azmo the Dragon

Country: United States

Interesting Links 23 May 2011

Seth Godin Needs To Visit a Library

Interesting Posts 16 May 2011

Play InterroBang

Teaching Students To Create Their Own Business

Most Read Posts–April 2011

DreamSpark, AppHub and Windows Phone Development

Enter the Student App-a-thon

Computer Science Curricula In Flux

Computing Curriculum: Computer Science 2013 (CS2013) Overview

Charter

Interesting Projects–A Collection

US Imagine Cup People’s Choice Awards

FutureFed Expert Videos: Dan Kasun on Making Open Government Data Valuable

Rebirth of DIY Software Development

Top Read Posts February 2011

Dream. Build. Play. is back for 2011

Students be sure to check out DreamSpark for all the development software you could possibly need. Oh and need I remind you that it is free!

Interesting Links 28 February 2011

FizzBuzz–A Programming Question

Triangle Shooter–An XNA Windows Phone Game By Kenny Spade

Making the Case for Becoming a Computer Science Teacher

Ed Donahue Joins the Microsoft Academic Team

My Most Read Posts of 2010

Microsoft bliink…a web design competition for high school students

Interesting Links Post December 6th 2010

Computer Science Teacher Blog posts for November 2010

Pledge to Participate in and be a Supporter of Computer Science Education Week!

Wisdom in Lists–Really?

Welcoming Andrew Parsons to the US Academic Team

Introducing the Microsoft US Academic Bloggers

Edwin Guarin Now Blogging

Interesting Links 27 September 2010

Most Popular Posts From August

Interesting Posts 30 August 2010

Interesting Links Post 23 August 2010

Interesting Links 9 August 2010

CyKho is back

Highlights of the Week ending July 17

Team USA Heads to Poland to Compete in the Imagine Cup

Critical Thinking

Interesting Links 14 June 2010

New URL

Interesting Links 7 June 2010