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March 2007 - Posts

Thursday, March 29, 2007 2:15

DigiGirlz - Getting Girls Interested in Science and Technology

DigiGirlz is an outreach program run by people at Microsoft who are specifically interested in getting more young women interested in Information Technology. Recently the New England Cable News channel reported on a DigiGirlz event at the Microsoft Technology
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 5 Comments
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Wednesday, March 28, 2007 3:33

Today's Announcements and Random Useful Links

CMU Center for Computational Thinking This actually came out Monday but MSR and Carnegie Mellon announced the new Microsoft Carnegie Mellon Center for Computational Thinking . The part of this announcement that excites me is this sentence "In addition,
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Tuesday, March 27, 2007 2:07

Game Camp Canada

Well the Canadian Academic Team are at it again. They've just opened a new site to help people create their own Game Camps. Or you can go there and find out about new Game Camps as they become scheduled. The site is called the Develop Mental Institute
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Monday, March 26, 2007 3:02

Programming Proverbs 13: Do not recompute constants within a loop

This was big in it's time because compilers were pretty dumb back then. If you added one to three inside a loop that ran a thousand times then the computer would add one to three a thousand times. Hopefully it would come up with four each time. This was
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 1 Comments
Friday, March 23, 2007 2:55

Learning things the hard way

One of the first things I did when I took over as Technology Coordinator for my last school was to start putting together a backup plan. We eventually had nightly incremental backups and weekly full backups. We had several weekly backups at any given
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 1 Comments
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Thursday, March 22, 2007 3:42

AP CS Conversation Follow Up

My post on the AP CS exam gathered a bunch of comments. Some of them on the post itself and some of them on other blogs. Below I link to the other blog posts that I know about so far. Join the conversation here or there or elsewhere. Brian Scarbeau -
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Wednesday, March 21, 2007 2:00

Programming for Kids Who Cannot Read and Write

The Boku project is an interesting research project that lets young children create simple programs to more a robot around an imaginary three dimensional world. Laura Foy of On10 has a video of the very first public demonstration. I've been hearing about
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Tuesday, March 20, 2007 1:53

Computer Science and Information Technology Symposium at NECC

Microsoft is a sponsor of this high-profile event, hosted by CSTA and ISTE, being held on June 28th 2007 in conjunction with the National Educational Computing Conference (NECC) 2007. The CS & IT Symposium is a professional development opportunity
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 1 Comments
Monday, March 19, 2007 5:54 PM

Programming Proverbs 12: Leave loop variables alone

Another way of expressing this is to use loop as if they were read-only constants. Loop variables should be initialized and changed only in the loop statement itself. The problem with doing it anywhere else is that it is too easy to either make the modification
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 2 Comments
Sunday, March 18, 2007 3:18 PM

Advanced Placement Computer Science - Time for a Big Change?

OK let's start with the disclaimer first. These are my personal opinions and only my personal opinions. I am not speaking for any company or any other individual in full or in part. I have been giving a lot of thought to the Advanced Placement Computer
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 7 Comments
Thursday, March 15, 2007 2:12 PM

Take Part in a National Survey of High School Computer Science

The CSTA (Computer Science Teachers Association) is conducting a survey of the state of high school computer science in the US. If you are a high school computer science teacher in the US please take part in this survey . There is a lot of discussion
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 1 Comments
Thursday, March 15, 2007 1:18

Programming Proverbs 11: Use intermediate variables properly

Intermediate variables are variables that are used to break calculations down into several steps. For example the use of intermediate variables takes something like this: x = a + b * (sqrt(y) + w) and turns it into something like this: var1 = a + b var2
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 5 Comments
Wednesday, March 14, 2007 11:40 PM

Using the Wii Controller from Windows using C# or VB

Thanks to a link from Dan Fernandez I found out that Coding 4 Fun has information about programming the Wiimote (Wii Game Controller) using either Visual Basic .NET or C#. There is sample code and instructions. Looks interesting even if I don't have a
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 3 Comments
Wednesday, March 14, 2007 1:24

Learning to Program in the Wild

Mark Guzdial gives a snapshot look at a research student done by several of his graduate students on how programmers who learn on their own actually program. A lot of interesting things there. Things like these programmers use a lot more FOR loops than
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 5 Comments
Tuesday, March 13, 2007 2:44

Summer Computer Science Experience for HS Students

Pace University in New York City is running their Seidenberg Summer Experience program again this coming summer. This is an outstanding summer program that seems to have gotten great reviews following its initial year last summer. (I wrote about that
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Monday, March 12, 2007 10:46

Creating Vista Gadgets

Are you playing around with Vista yet? If so than you have probably added or edited or at least used Vista Gadgets on the Sidebar. If you'd like to make your own gadgets Martin Schray (one of the leads in the US Academic Relations Team) has created a
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Monday, March 12, 2007 1:38

Programming Proverbs 10: Use good mnemonic names

Mnemonic names are names that make it clear what they are for. I've always viewed mnemonic names as being an important part or self-documenting code. There is little question that they make reading someone's code a lot easier. But there is probably a
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 1 Comments
Friday, March 09, 2007 1:58

Make the Future - A Career in Computer Science

Bernard Oh (a friend of mine from Singapore currently working in Australia) posted an interesting video by Microsoft Research on one possible future though computer science. It features a flying robot, wearable computer devices and some nice skateboarding.
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 1 Comments
Thursday, March 08, 2007 1:50

Programming Proverb 9: Get the syntax correct now, not later

How often does students say they'll fix the syntax later? They are in such a rush to enter their code that they let "little" syntax errors slide until later. Or worst still they enter code carelessly assuming that the compiler with find and highlight
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 1 Comments
Thursday, March 08, 2007 1:33

Programming Proverbs 8: Avoid side effects

Side effects are actions that change things outside of a procedure, function or method. Generally this happens when a procedure modifies a global variable. I'm tempted to suggest that this proverb might just as well be "avoid unnecessary global variables."
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 1 Comments
Wednesday, March 07, 2007 5:45 PM

SIGCSE - I'm There Are You Here?

I arrived in Covington KY where SIGCSE has returned this year. SIGCSE was here several years ago and some of the employees in the hotel and conference center are wearing buttons that says "Welcome Back SIGCSE." I think that is a nice touch. It is a small
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Wednesday, March 07, 2007 1:18

Programming Proverbs 7: Avoid unnecessary GOTO's

This was quite the controversy when it all started. Today some people go through a whole programming course without even learning that the language they are using even has a GOTO statement. An unconditionally GOTO statement barely exists in most programs
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 1 Comments
Tuesday, March 06, 2007 2:03

Summer Workshops for High School Computer Science Teachers

The following are reprints of announcements that were sent to the Advanced Placement Computer Science teacher mailing list by Tom Cortina and Don Slater of Carnegie Mellon University. Following the CMU announcements are a few other summer workshops I
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Tuesday, March 06, 2007 1:09

Computer Science Podcasts by Women for Women

The Women in Computer Science students at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania have created a series of computer science podcasts on Computer Science topics. So far they have podcasts on topics such as genetic algorithms, zip code encoding, encryption,
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 1 Comments
Monday, March 05, 2007 1:58

Beginner Developer Learning Center

The Visual Studio Express people have just announced a new Beginner Developer Learning Center . The main part of the site is for beginners of all ages who are interested in learning how to program computers or design and build dynamic web sites. It looks
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Monday, March 05, 2007 12:05

Halo 2 On a Planetarium Dome

New Hampshire Technical Institute (a community college that is part of New Hampshire's community technical college system) has an amazing Animation and Graphic Game Programming course of studies. Among other things they have a lab with a number of Xbox
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Friday, March 02, 2007 1:26

Upcoming Visit to Stevens (NJ) High School CS Conference

Later in March I am heading down to the Stevens Institute of Tecnology in New Jersey to give a keynote talk at their first (hopefully) annual workshop on Computer Science in High School . Growing up across the river in New York I heard a lot of great
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Thursday, March 01, 2007 1:50

When Text is No Longer Just Text

Recently I found this wonderful video by Michael Wesch of Kansas State University. Dr. Wesch is creating a Digital Ethnography working group at Kansas State University "to examine the impacts of digital technology on human interaction." The video is a
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
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