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April 2008 - Posts

Wednesday, April 30, 2008 8:27

Best Practices: Designing Mobile Applications

digg_url = 'http://blogs.msdn.com/alfredth/archive/2008/04/30/best-practices-designing-mobile-applications.aspx'; These days mobile devices are everywhere. One of the cool things about Windows Mobile devices (Smartphones and Pocket PCs among others) is
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 2 Comments
Tuesday, April 29, 2008 6:28

Pitching Your Idea - An Interview About Presentations

digg_url = 'http://blogs.msdn.com/alfredth/archive/2008/04/29/pitching-your-idea.aspx'; Perry Lowe, a marketing professor at Bentley College and Philip DesAutels , were at the recent US Imagine Cup finals giving some presentations to the competitors.
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 2 Comments
Monday, April 28, 2008 7:58

Trip Report – Summit (NJ) Schools

digg_url = 'http://blogs.msdn.com/alfredth/archive/2008/04/28/trip-report-summit-nj-high-school.aspx'; Last week I took a trip down to Summit High School to take part in a teacher workshop day. There were about 200 teachers from the high school and middle
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Friday, April 25, 2008 4:01 PM

RoboChamps – Online, Virtual Robot Competition

digg_url = 'http://blogs.msdn.com/alfredth/archive/2008/04/25/robochamps-online-virtual-robot-competition.aspx'; Most robotic competitions are fairly expensive to enter. The hardware is expensive, hard to assemble and tends to break at the worst possible
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 1 Comments
Thursday, April 24, 2008 7:00

Popfly Coin Flip Mashup Tutorial

digg_url = 'http://blogs.msdn.com/alfredth/archive/2008/04/24/popfly-coin-flip-mashup-tutorial.aspx'; This is a tutorial I put together to provide a hands on experience for some teachers I am doing a workshop for today. I did a copy from a Word document
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 3 Comments
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Tuesday, April 22, 2008 6:03

XNA Links for Teachers (and other learners)

digg_url = 'http://blogs.msdn.com/alfredth/archive/2008/04/22/xna-links-for-teachers-and-other-learners.aspx'; I’ve been hearing from a lot of high school computer science teachers that they are looking for some fun and educational things to do with their
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 2 Comments
Monday, April 21, 2008 11:00

Computer Literacy 3.0

Computer literacy is a topic that seems to be growing in controversy as quickly as it it is growing in importance. Recently Larry Press , California State University, Dominguez Hills, sent me an announcement of the Computer Literacy 3.0 blog he has created
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 2 Comments
Friday, April 18, 2008 5:32

Boston Public Schools Cyber Safety Program

The Boston Public schools have a very nice cyber safety program with a home on the Internet. This site has resources for teachers, students and families. These resources include posters and presentations that can be downloaded and used. While they are
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Thursday, April 17, 2008 6:39

Is It Ever Too Early To Teach Security?

About 25 years ago, back in the mini-computer era, I was a developer in an operating system group. My team was working on a brand new print and batch spooling system. We were creating a system with a lot more power and flexibility than the previous system.
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 5 Comments
Tuesday, April 15, 2008 11:57

Digital Dorm Room Tour

My friend Edwin is on the road running the northeast leg of the Digital Dorm Room tour . Today he is actually at Brooklyn College which is near and dear to my heart because my wife went there and because it is only blocks away from where I grew up. The
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 1 Comments
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Tuesday, April 15, 2008 7:24

When One Thing Leads To Another

The laws of unintended consequences seem to live in computer science and software development. Most good software products seem to wind up being used in unexpected ways. More than that one thing seems to always lead to another and not always in expected
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Monday, April 14, 2008 7:50

An Expression Web Video Tutorial

Randy Guthrie has posted a very nice 34 minute long video tutorial on how to create a personal web site using Expression Web. Expression Web is free for schools though the MSDN AA program . For college/university students it is also free through the Dreamspark
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Friday, April 11, 2008 12:44 PM

Popfly in the Classroom - Trip Report

First the surprising secret - students today are not all that Web 2.0 knowledgeable. Now you wouldn't get that from the media but its true. Oh sure there are a lot of young people out there creating new media, using instant messaging tools, downloading
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Friday, April 11, 2008 7:39

NCWIT Award for Aspirations in Computing

NCWIT (National Center for Women & Information Technology) is running an award program for high school women in the greater metropolitan areas of Atlanta, Boston, Charlotte, Chicago, Dallas, and New York City Sponsored by Bank of America, the NCWIT
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 1 Comments
Thursday, April 10, 2008 2:18 PM

History of Data Storage

Thanks to a link from Leigh Ann Sudol's blog I found this set of images and descriptions of some early computer data storage devices . I confess to having some old punch cards and I think some old magnetic tapes in the attic. I used punch paper tape as
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Wednesday, April 09, 2008 2:04 PM

Bootstrapping XNA into High School Computer Science

I've been talking to a lot of schools lately that are experimenting with game development using XNA in their courses. For some of them at least some of the motivation is to attract more students into their computer science programs. Springbrook High School
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 2 Comments
Tuesday, April 08, 2008 6:16

Getting A Job - The Blizzard Edition

This week Clint posted his interview with John Cash from Blizzard Entertainment over at Channel 8. The "money line" in the interview is something like "you know that math you think you'll never need? Well you're going to need it." John keeps his college
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Monday, April 07, 2008 7:57

Top Conversations In March

There were a number of blog posts with above average comment counts in March. The post I wrote about number systems in computer science had 9 comments. Pretty much everyone thought this was/is an important topic for computer science students. Personally
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 1 Comments
Sunday, April 06, 2008 12:27 PM

Is There A Future For High School Computer Science?

OK that is a fairly provocative title. But I think it is actually a fair and reasonable question. The decision last week to drop one of the Advanced Placement Computer Science exams ( which I discussed here ) has brought a whole new level of discussion
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 5 Comments
Friday, April 04, 2008 3:18 PM

College Board to discontinue the AP CS AB exam

Well the news hit like a thunderclap in the Advanced Placement Computer Science world today - the College Board has decided to discontinue the AP CS AB exam after next school year. That will leave one AP CS exam, the A exam, rather than the two course
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 9 Comments
Wednesday, April 02, 2008 5:22

XNA Game-Themed Assignments

Kelvin Sung from the University of Washington at Bothell has a project that is building XNA Game-Themed assignments for use in computer science classes. I haven't looked at the project too deeply but from the write-up it looks like it might be useful.
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 1 Comments
Tuesday, April 01, 2008 6:46

Microsoft Game Studio On Who They Hire

Clint Rutkas has posted his interview with Frank Savage from Microsoft Gaming Studios over on Channel 8 . Frank talks about what it takes to get a job in the game industry. He talks about the need for students to take math and physics in the first few
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 1 Comments
 
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