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September 2007 - Posts

Friday, September 28, 2007 4:00 AM

Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams

It's been about a week now since Randy Pausch of Carnegie Mellon gave his last lecture . In high school and middle school computer science Randy is best known for being the person behind Alice - the graphical virtual reality programming environment. Alice
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 1 Comments
Thursday, September 27, 2007 3:20 AM

Heavyweight or Lightweight User Interfaces

We're all pretty used to search engine interfaces being pretty simple and lightweight these days. A simple input box, a couple of buttons, and a simple list of output for results. But what else might a search engine interface look like? Well there are
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Wednesday, September 26, 2007 3:13 AM

Global Challenge - A STEM Competition

The Global Challenge is an interesting competition for high school students. From the website: In the Global Challenge , teams of US high school students collaborate with international counterparts from October to May to address global climate change
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
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Tuesday, September 25, 2007 3:11 AM

Do We Still Need To Teach HTML

Brian Scarbeau asks " Should html be taught in a web design course? " The comments at his blog are all a resounding "yes" which surprises me. While I do agree that there is a lot of value in learning the underlying HTML in a first course I expected others
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 6 Comments
Monday, September 24, 2007 11:21 AM

Imagine Cup 2008 is Ramping Up

The Imagine Cup, an international set of competitions for computer college/university students, is starting up again. The theme this year is "imagine a world where technology enables a sustainable environment." This is a chance to make an impression on
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Friday, September 21, 2007 6:24 AM

New Robotics Curriculum from Microsoft Robotics Studio

Recently the Microsoft Robotics Studio team released a seven unit introductory course in robotics. I borrowed a bit of the overview and posted it here. Robotics Introductory Courseware Overview The robotics introductory courseware is a set of labs that
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Thursday, September 20, 2007 6:59 AM

2007 FIRST Women in Science and Technology Forum

While FIRST is best known for there amazing robotics competitions they have been running an annual event to encourage young women to enter the science and technology fields for a number of years now. This may be mostly of interest to people, especially
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Wednesday, September 19, 2007 4:11 PM

Road Trip - CCSC Eastern 2007 Conference

One of the really great things I get to do is to attend conferences. I find these to be great experiences for me. The people who attend education conferences are among the smartest and most interesting people I get to meet. In October I am going to be
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Wednesday, September 19, 2007 4:38 AM

Computer Science Education Day 2007 is Coming

Brian Scarbeau the man who came up with this great idea recently reminded me that Computer Science Education Day is coming up this December 7th, 2007. This particular day has been selected because it is close to the birthday of Grace Murray Hopper - computer
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 1 Comments
Tuesday, September 18, 2007 3:33 AM

High School Internships at Microsoft

Microsoft brings in a large number of interns each summer. Almost all of them are undergraduate or graduate students at some university. I get asked about internships for high school students all the time but they are pretty rare. For the most part high
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
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Monday, September 17, 2007 2:51 PM

School Of The Future Resource Kit Available

A new resource kit has become available for people interested in Philadelphia's School of the Future . As you may know the School of the Future is a new public school that was designed from the ground up to use technology as a teaching tool (much more
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
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Friday, September 14, 2007 1:27 PM

Tablet PC Articles available

This must be the week for Tablet PC news. The IEEE Computer Society magazine issue with a bunch of articles on Tablet PCs in education is available for free download ( PDF file - 4.6 MB) for a limited time (thanks to a link from Jim Vanides at HP) Articles
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 2 Comments
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Friday, September 14, 2007 3:44 AM

Great Deal on Microsoft Office for College Students

Why doesn't Microsoft do great deals like this for high school students? Mostly I assume because it is harder to verify eligibility. That's just life. But for college students this deal is a real bargain. No wonder they call it the Ultimate Steal . Microsoft®
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
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Thursday, September 13, 2007 3:11 AM

The Important Things We Are Leaving Out of Computer Science Education

Recently eWeek had a great article entitled " Programming Grads Meet a Skills Gap in the Real World " that I think every computer science/software engineering/computer engineering teacher at any level you read. Agree or disagree it is a powerful and important
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 4 Comments
Wednesday, September 12, 2007 5:50 AM

Tablet PCs in Action in the Classroom

OK this is too cool not to share. On Monday I blogged about the Thomas Jefferson school that uses Tablet PCs in the classroom. Yesterday I found out that the school was on local TV with coverage on how the Tablets are being used. They have the video up
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 2 Comments
Tuesday, September 11, 2007 10:19 AM

Software Engineering Vs. Fun

"The goal of much of software engineering is to remove all the fun out of programming." So says Colin Potts of Georgia Tech as quoted by Mark Guzdial also of Georgia Tech. Well if that doesn't scare one away from software engineering and computer science
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 5 Comments
Monday, September 10, 2007 8:05 PM

Department of Learning Prevention

Earlier I reported on a teacher who was seeing some interesting and positive results by letting students use tools (computer software tools) that are often blocked or banned in schools. Today we learn the other side of this coin. Ben Chun reports in his
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 4 Comments
Monday, September 10, 2007 7:30 AM

The Risks of Letting Students Use The Network

You really have to be careful about letting students use computer/network chat programs in school. I mean you hear it all the time. If you let them run chat programs they'll do all sorts of talking behind your back. Who knows what they'll be talking about.
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 4 Comments
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Monday, September 10, 2007 3:31 AM

A Tablet PC School That Works

While I am not a fan of just dropping computers into a school and expecting miracles I do believe that with the right training, preparation and supportive teachers and administration things can work out well. Recently I heard from Robert Carlson at the
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 4 Comments
Friday, September 07, 2007 3:45 AM

Debugging Training For Beginners

One of the hardest things for students to learn how to do is to debug their code. I think that most students are somewhat surprised when their programs don't work. They get over that surprise pretty quickly of course because bugs are pretty common place.
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 1 Comments
Thursday, September 06, 2007 3:55 AM

Excel Training for Teachers (and others)

Teachers and school administrators have lots of data. lots and lots of data. Grades, test results, attendance information, behavior reports, often budget numbers, and well it goes on and on. People would be surprised at how much information teachers and
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Wednesday, September 05, 2007 1:20 PM

Problets - Little Learning Problems

Problets are little coding problems that are designed to be useful for learning by beginning programmers. Typically teachers use small examples and exercises to help students internalize concepts like arithmetic expressions. Students are asked to evaluate
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Wednesday, September 05, 2007 1:11 PM

What Do You Do the First Day of Class

The first day of any class often sets the tone of the whole run of the course. That's the time when teachers get to introduce the students to what the course is really about. What are the expectations the teacher has for the students? What are the rules
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 1 Comments
Tuesday, September 04, 2007 11:00 AM

The Problem with Games in Computer Science Class

Leigh Ann Sudol is one of those exciting and energetic teachers that make one ask "where were teachers like that when I was a student." She's awfully smart and has taught computer science both in high school and more recently at Carnegie Mellon University.
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 2 Comments
 
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