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January 2007 - Posts

Wednesday, January 31, 2007 5:04 AM

Taking the Computer Teacher (and their lab) For Granted

Kathy Weaver reports on an all too common occurrence for school computer science teachers. In the middle of teaching a class another teacher came into the room to interrupt with a computer question. In the middle of teaching a lesson! Can you imagine
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 3 Comments
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Tuesday, January 30, 2007 11:35 AM

Visual Studio Keyboard Shortcut Posters

Are you a keyboard shortcut sort of person? Do you like to keep your hands on the keyboard and bypass the menus? I admit that I am one of those people. So when I saw that Microsoft has made available some reference posters for Visual Studio keyboard shortcuts
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 3 Comments
Monday, January 29, 2007 3:35 PM

Variable Constants and When Things that Never Change Actually Change

One of the great learning experiences of my professional career was working on a project that would test up to 16 computers in a cluster. We were told that 16 was the maximum number and that for performance reasons that number was not ever going to change.
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Friday, January 26, 2007 11:49 AM

Launch Day Opportunity to Win a Computer Lab for Your School

I just found out about a special promotion designed to get people into the stores the day that Windows Vista officially becomes available for sale (January 30th 2007). The program is described here . But a brief description cribbed from the site is below.
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
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Friday, January 26, 2007 6:10 AM

What are you teaching (in your first programming course)?

I ran across Robert Floyd's Turing Award lecture last night. It was an interesting read and frankly there was a lot in there to make me think about the state of computer science, computer programming and how we teach those two closely related topics.
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 9 Comments
Wednesday, January 24, 2007 9:05 PM

Deploying Windows Vista (and Office 2007 and Windows XP and Office 2003)

I attended a big launch event for Windows Vista and Office 2007 in Boston today. Over 2,500 people, mostly from business, showed up to get a good look at these new products. We did have a group of students and teachers from Minuteman Tech and I think
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Tuesday, January 23, 2007 1:17 AM

The Computer Teacher is Overworked

For the non-teachers reading let me give you some vocabulary and some background. Those of you who are teachers please correct me if you have different experiences and if you've had the same stick around to give advice in the comments. OK then. Teachers
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 5 Comments
Monday, January 22, 2007 2:05 AM

Pocket PC Programming and that is just the beginning

Brian Scarbeau is one of my favorite high school computer science teachers for two specific reasons. One is that he is always trying new things and teaching them to his students. The other is that he blogs about it . Sharing his ideas and experiences
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 1 Comments
Friday, January 19, 2007 11:48 AM

Programming Proverbs

A recent blog post by Josh Ledgard reminded me of a book that had a great influence in my early programming days. The books was Programming Proverbs by Henry Ledgard and I still have my copy. It's one of the few computer books I bought in the mid 1970's
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 11 Comments
Thursday, January 18, 2007 2:30 AM

Getting Started with SQL Server Express - Video Training for Beginners

I see that Microsoft has released five more videos in their SQL Server 2005 Express Edition for Beginners series . (Now that is a mouthful of a title. There are now 13 difference videos that make up almost 9 hours of training. The videos can be watched
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Wednesday, January 17, 2007 2:13 AM

Scratch - Got an itch to teach programming to youngsters?

It looks like the Scratch programming toolkit has now gone public. Scratch is a programming language developed at MIT that lets people, including young students, create interactive stories, games, music, and art. The Lifelong Kindergarten Group (is that
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Tuesday, January 16, 2007 2:15 AM

Engineering Education Reality TV Show

I read that the IEEE is helping to fund a reality TV style show around engineering problems . “ Design Squad ” is a new half-hour weekly television program produced by WGBH Boston. The show will feature two competing teams of high school students plucked
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
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Monday, January 15, 2007 5:08 PM

HOPL: an interactive Roster of Programming Languages

Thanks to a comment left earlier today I found HOPL, the History of Programming Languages which is an amazing collection of information about programming languages and their history. It is highly interactive and searchable with information on 8,512 different
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Monday, January 15, 2007 2:39 AM

Getting Started with XNA Game Creators Club

Over at the XNA blog they have announced a video demonstration on how to use the XNA Game Creators Club software to get your XNA game running on your Xbox 360. This video demonstrates how to: Download the software/tools to your Windows PC Buy a membership
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 1 Comments
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Friday, January 12, 2007 2:47 AM

Picking Programming Languages for High School - Never Ending Story

I see that Susan Canaga is bringing her school's discussion on programming languages looking for industry opinions. This is a topic I have addressed a number of times before (most recently here ) but one which never seems to be settled. In any case if
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 21 Comments
Thursday, January 11, 2007 2:00 AM

Creating Your Own K-12 Outreach Program

Over at the NCWIT blog I see that there is going to be a workshop for people at colleges and universities who want to start a K-12 Outreach program at SIGCSE 2007 . The people running the workshop have some serious experience creating and running a successful
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Wednesday, January 10, 2007 1:27 AM

Geek Speak - From English to Geek to VB

I came across an interesting course web site the other day. (Link found at the EdTechDev blog) Larry Press of California State University, Dominguez Hills uses what he calls Geek language as an intermediate step between and English language statement
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 1 Comments
Tuesday, January 09, 2007 1:52 AM

Information Technology Worker Demand Up - Supply Down

An interesting article in the Westchester County Business Journal (NY) reports that the demand for IT workers in the US and especially in the New York City area (generally a leading indicator in my experience) is on the rise. In Westchester [ just north
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Monday, January 08, 2007 9:03 PM

Create Robot from iRobot

Looks like the people at iRobot have noticed the demand for computers by hobbyists and education. There were was supported to program the standard Roomba vacuum robot but that was actually pretty limited. Today at the Consumer Electronics Show they announced
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 1 Comments
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Monday, January 08, 2007 2:11 AM

Programmers to Blame for Hard-to-Use Software

Did you read the headline for this post and thing "well, duh!" I know that's what I thought. The headline comes from a Reuters article I read recently. In the old days programmers and users were pretty much one and the same. We didn't let ordinary people
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Friday, January 05, 2007 1:39 AM

Games in Education - Teaching with Games

Walter Stiers linked to some interesting research on games in education last week. An organization called futurelab in the UK is researching the use of off the shelf games in education . I really get excited about the idea of using games as teaching tools.
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 1 Comments
Thursday, January 04, 2007 3:30 AM

Where will the Next Bill Gates Come From?

MSNBC had an interesting article about a survey that suggests that most Americans believe that the next Bill Gates will come from outside the United States. Nearly half of Americans said that the next great technology leader will come from China or Japan,
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 1 Comments
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Thursday, January 04, 2007 2:08 AM

Is there an upside to the decline in computer science enrollment?

Chris Stephenson of the CSTA has some interesting comments at the CSTA blog about a possible upside to the recent decline in post-secondary computer science enrollments. Chris's most interesting statement is this one: Dropping enrollments are providing
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 1 Comments
Wednesday, January 03, 2007 1:45 AM

Digital Literacy Curriculum From Microsoft

Digital Literacy is an area that is receiving a lot of attention these days as we come to grips with the idea that almost everyone is an information worker in some way or another. I recently learned that Microsoft has a digital literacy curriculm available.
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 2 Comments
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Wednesday, January 03, 2007 1:40 AM

Attention Canadian Secondary School Programming Students

There is an online community site for Canadian students and programming enthusiasts at Compsci.ca . They have discussion forums (discussing languages including C, C++, Java, PHP, Ruby, Turing, and Visual Basic), a wiki and a blog . That site is also involved
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Tuesday, January 02, 2007 1:54 AM

Thinking About Numbers - Decimal, Binary and Roman

One of the things I found to be a little bit scary was how limited the understanding so many high school students had about the nature of numbers. Oh sure they understood the difference between real number and integers and they had a sense of the scale
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 3 Comments
 
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