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November 2006 - Posts

Wednesday, November 29, 2006 1:56 AM

Creating A Splash Screen in 60 Seconds or Less

I haven't written a short hint or trick fro Visual Studio in a while but I ran into one tonight that I just had to share. Traditionally creating a splash screen has been a good bit of work, even in Visual Basic. First one had to create the form which
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 2 Comments
Tuesday, November 28, 2006 1:31 AM

Recursion - See Recursion

It's nice to see Dave Jacobus blogging about his programming courses again. Looks like all of his classes (IB CS, AP CS and Visual Basic) are all learning about recursion lately. Recursion is a really cool concept. I have to admit though that it took
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 3 Comments
Monday, November 27, 2006 1:48 AM

Top 10 Girl Geeks?

OK this list is a little controversial and rightly so. Including Lisa Simpson and Paris Hilton on a list that includes such people as Grace Hopper (my personal hero) and Marie Curie (two time winner of the Nobel Prize) is really insulting. Oh sure Lisa
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 1 Comments
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Tuesday, November 21, 2006 2:30 PM

HP Announces 2007 HP Technology for Teaching Grant Initiative

I got this via email and thought it worth passing on. A lot of grant opportunities are only available to colleges and universities but this one is open to K-12 schools. HP Announces 2007 HP Technology for Teaching Grant Initiative Request for Proposals
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
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Tuesday, November 21, 2006 1:36 AM

Inspiration, Imagination, Innovation

Of all the comments that have been made on my most busy post to date one from Gregg Irwin best captured what I was hoping to do by posting that story. I was hoping to inspire some young people to trying to stretch themselves a bit. I was hoping to encourage
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Monday, November 20, 2006 1:45 AM

Are you ready for Windows Vista? Is your school ready?

Schools that have the full (call it the college edition) MSDN AA program should see Windows Vista as an available option for download today. The high school MSDN AA program doesn't include operating systems and that is reflected in the much lower cost
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 1 Comments
Friday, November 17, 2006 2:30 AM

Computer Science Education Day is Coming

I was reminded today that Computer Science Education day is December 8th. Visit the official web site for information. It's timed to coincide with Grace Hopper's birthday (which is actually the Saturday but apparently a lot of schools are closed on Saturday.)
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Thursday, November 16, 2006 1:25 AM

Objects Early, Objects Late, Objects Never?

Sometimes just when you think an argument is over and become a settled issue someone else comes up an reopens it. Sometimes what you discover is that people have been as much beaten into submission as convinced my the arguments. All they were waiting
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 1 Comments
Wednesday, November 15, 2006 2:46 PM

An Opening To Teach Game Development

Terry Simkin is running an interesting new program at the New Hampshire Technical Institute in Concord New Hampshire. He sent me a job posting for a new position they have there. I've copied it below and if you know anyone who might be interested let
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Wednesday, November 15, 2006 1:24 AM

Why go to college?

If you'll excuse some gross generalizations for the sake of discussion I think that there are three main goals for various college programs. To prepare people for a job upon graduation To prepare people for a career upon graduation To prepare people for
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 2 Comments
Tuesday, November 14, 2006 12:29 PM

XNA Video Montage & New Tutorials

Major Nelson of Xbox 360 fame announced a video montage of some XNA Game Studio Express games that people have been developing. The video is optimized for Zune even! Dave "LetsKillDave" Weller explains the video on his blog. People are already doing some
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
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Tuesday, November 14, 2006 1:43 AM

That's not real programming

One of the repeating themes that came up in the comments in my post last week about a 12-year old programmer was that the student was not doing "real programming." Some of that may have been snobbery. Some of it may have been jealousy. Some of it may
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 2 Comments
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Sunday, November 12, 2006 3:25 PM

We need some awards for subject matter bloggers

I wrote most of this post for my general education blog at On10 but the more I thought about it the more I realized that I needed to present it to a larger audience. So here it goes. I was reading the announcement for the Educational Blogger awards here
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 3 Comments
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Saturday, November 11, 2006 10:05 AM

Rob Miles on XNA Game Studio Express

Rob Miles is a lecturer at the University of Hull and one of my favorite educational bloggers . In this video Rob talks about XNA Game Studio Express and the reasons he is excited about using it in his teaching. It's a short little clip but gives a good
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
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Thursday, November 09, 2006 4:18 PM

Welcome Digg Readers

I don't know if any of you who found my blog from the Digg link of yesterday are sticking around to read more of my blog. I hope that some of you will find some interesting things here. While I post mostly thinking about things that are interesting and
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 1 Comments
Tuesday, November 07, 2006 8:26 AM

Just Add Imagination

I met a 12-year old programmer yesterday. He was on a field trip to the Microsoft Technology Center in Chicago with his middle school. He'd brought a USB storage stick with a program he'd written on it to show us. What he had written was a very cool web
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 148 Comments
Friday, November 03, 2006 5:42 AM

How to break into and destroy someone's database!

OK did that title get your attention? I suspect that if one started a classroom discussion with "How would you like to break someone's online database?" one would get the full attention of every student in the room. Well the fact is that doing this is
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Thursday, November 02, 2006 1:40 AM

What is so scary about programming?

It seems fitting to talk about scary stories so soon after Halloween somehow. Yesterday I read a very interesting post by Mark Guzdial at the NCWIT Site . In it he talks about running into significant numbers of college students who are terrified of programming.
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 6 Comments
Wednesday, November 01, 2006 8:07 PM

XNA Game Studio Express Beta 2 Announced

Well it's all over the Internet now but the official announcement of Beta 2 of the XNA Game Studio Express is at the XNA Blog . There are a bunch of changes, some of them added features but some of them may break code developed with Beta 1, so you will
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
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Wednesday, November 01, 2006 8:46 AM

Computer Science Unplugged Videos Online

Peter Henderson from Butler University let me know that there are now some videos on the Computer Science Unplugged program online . Computer Science Unplugged This is a 50 minute talk by Tim Bell, an Associate Professor in the department of Computer
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 1 Comments
 
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