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May 2007 - Posts

Thursday, May 31, 2007 2:41

Educational Uses for Microsoft Surface

You know every so often someone writes a simple blog post that when you read it makes you want to hit your head and say "how in the world did I not think of that?" Vicki A Davis did that yesterday in her Cool Cat Teacher blog . No wonder she is one of
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Wednesday, May 30, 2007 6:57

Changing the Way We Think About Input Output

The first computer I ever programmed was the IBM 1130 and initially input meant using a card reader . Output meant using a line printer . Now if you were really lucky, which means you were in an advanced course and had permission to use the computer after
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 4 Comments
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Wednesday, May 30, 2007 3:58

Parent's Guide to Windows Vista

Most new PCs these days are coming with Windows Vista on them. If you are a parent, especially if your children are younger, this can be quite a boon to you as there are many new security features in Vista that can be helpful to parents. Blake Handler
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 1 Comments
Tuesday, May 29, 2007 2:50

Celebrating Smarts

The other week I attended a good sized programming competition at St Joseph's College in Patchogue New York. It was a great event and very well run. There were over 100 high school students in 34 teams representing about 16-18 high schools. I'd love to
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 1 Comments
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Friday, May 25, 2007 3:00

Programming Proverbs 18: Use Comments

Is there anything so obvious to an experienced programmer that is so hard to get across to students than comments? Students know that they are so smart that they will remember everything about their programs. And of course they think they are smart enough
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 5 Comments
Wednesday, May 23, 2007 11:31

PopFly Invitations

I have two invitations to the PopFly alpha available. I want to give them to a K-12 teacher or student . I want them to go to someone who will really use them . Someone who wants to do a cool mashup or build a really experimental, interactive web page.
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Tuesday, May 22, 2007 3:21

Does Personality Matter?

I read a very interesting article in a recent edition of the Communications of the ACM entitled "Does Personality Matter?" The basic idea under discussion was that some personality types are better at debugging code than others. In the tests that were
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 1 Comments
Monday, May 21, 2007 3:21

Irrelevant Programming Languages

Mark Hendrickson from O'Reilly has an interesting review of the market for computer books in a four part series. The fourth part examines the programming language book market. I have no doubt that it is a valuable discussion for people who are thinking
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 5 Comments
Friday, May 18, 2007 2:09 PM

Are you tracking all the new things in web development?

I created a couple of web pages today. I fired up Notepad and started entering raw HTML instructions. Now granted these were simple pages that merely redirected people to actual interesting exciting web pages but still I felt comfortable and at home.
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Friday, May 18, 2007 3:00

Programming Proverbs 17: Never assume the computer assumes anything

The computer doesn't know what you mean, it only knows what you tell it. How often do we tell people that? Pretty often if I am any indication. And yet people do assume all the time. They assume that variables will be cleared out by the system before
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 1 Comments
Thursday, May 17, 2007 4:39

Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing 2007

Over at Diane Curtis' blog I read about the upcoming Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference. Specifically Diane points out that there are scholarships available for women who are undergraduate or graduate students to attend the conference.
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Wednesday, May 16, 2007 3:52

Lost in Translation in the move to Office 2007

Personally I love Office 2007 and have had enough time to make the transition to the new user interface. But that is not the case for everyone. I suspect that a lot of my regular readers are starting to see Office 2007 if not on their own computers than
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
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Tuesday, May 15, 2007 4:28

XNA In The Classroom

There really aren't a lot of books on XNA available yet (though some are coming) and real textbooks seem to be trailing the rest of the books. None of that is stopping the really innovative teachers though. Not in universities, not in community colleges
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 1 Comments
Monday, May 14, 2007 2:21

Health Care and Computers

One of the things I talk about over and over again is how ubiquitous computers are becoming. There are in just about any line of work you can imagine. And of course health care is no exception. Recently I came across a Microsoft health care focused blog
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
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Sunday, May 13, 2007 12:57 PM

Maker Faire 2007 - Why does the west coast get all the fun?

There is a whole write-up about Microsoft's presence at the upcoming Maker Faire on the Coding 4 Fun blog . I've been hearing about some of this from my friends Mark Hayes and Sam Stokes who will be there at the Microsoft booth again this year. They went
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
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Friday, May 11, 2007 3:00

Programming Proverbs 16: Build in debugging techniques

When ever programming teachers get together one of the debates that often starts up is between using a built-in debugger or using other debugging tools - most commonly extra print/display statements. It is an interesting debate and can get quite religious
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 3 Comments
Thursday, May 10, 2007 3:07

InstaCalc

Kalid Azad sent me an email about his online calculator site called InstaCalc and it is really impressive. It's the kind of project that people have talked about for years - one can type equations into the program and it just calculates the results. You
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 1 Comments
Wednesday, May 09, 2007 2:32

Fun and Educational Posts on the Visual Basic Team Blog

The Visual Basic team blog has had quite a run of great posts lately. The topics have been very interesting to me on several levels but one that really hits home to me is that they are very approachable. By that I mean one doesn't have to be a professional
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Tuesday, May 08, 2007 9:32

CSU Fullerton Game Camp (California)

One of my friends who is an adjunct profession in Game Development at California State Fullerton is having a game camp event later this month. Teachers and students in that part of the country may find this announcement interesting. California State University,
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 1 Comments
Tuesday, May 08, 2007 5:21

Workshop on the Impact of Pen-based Technology on Education

WIPTE (Workshop on the Impact of Pen-based Technology in Education) is coming up next month and it looks like a great conference. It will be June 11th and 12th at Purdue University in Indiana. WIPTE is open to anyone with an interest in instructional
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
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Monday, May 07, 2007 2:21

Is anyone teaching security in school?

Operating system security is a mystery to me in some regards. While there was a time when I thought I knew a good deal about security that was a long time ago. I was once the maintainer of the login and logout software for an operating system for example.
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 1 Comments
Friday, May 04, 2007 3:05

C# From a Java Perspective

I see that Dare Obasanjo has updated his wonderful article on C# From A Java Developer's Perspective . It's a great read and if you are a Java programmer (or have students who know Java) and want to get into some of the things that are cool about C# like
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Thursday, May 03, 2007 7:25

FREE Microsoft Certification exam (North American Students and Faculty Only)

My friend and co-worker Philip alerted me to this great deal for faculty and students. Note that is is limited time offer. Still getting ones first certification exam under ones belt is a great way to start building the resume. FREE Microsoft Certification
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Thursday, May 03, 2007 12:47

More on teaching kids to think - AKA CS concepts for looking things up

I talked about the need to teach thinking skills the other day . Yesterday I read Steve Dembo talking about much the same thing - teaching facts or teaching thinking. I'd like to add something else to that mix. One of my long time favorite sayings is
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
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Wednesday, May 02, 2007 1:08

Computer science, business grads snag highest average salaries

The CSTA Blog reproduced an article from The Daily Tar Heel, the student newspaper at the University of North Carolina the other day. Long story short? The current college graduates who are getting the big paychecks are computer science students first
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 5 Comments
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Tuesday, May 01, 2007 3:07

Variables Late or Variables Early?

One of the shining stars of teaching computer science in recent years is the Alice environment. There is some early research and many anecdotal tales of great success using this tool for teaching beginning programming. I must admit that I like it myself.
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 3 Comments
 
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