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July 2008 - Posts

Thursday, July 31, 2008 5:26

Visual Declarative Designer

Last week the Microsoft Visual Studio Middle School Toy was announced and I wrote about it in my blog . Today I wanted to give people a taste of what one of the features – the Visual Declarative Designer - looks like. This one really deserves the “toy”
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Wednesday, July 30, 2008 6:22

Foundations Of Digital Games Conference

The Game Development in Computer Science Education conference has been renamed and this year’s event is called the Fourth International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games . This is the premier educational conference for faculty who use game
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Tuesday, July 29, 2008 6:25

Teaching Flowcharts – Have the Computer Draw One

Last week the Microsoft Visual Studio Middle School Toy was announced and I wrote about it in my blog . Today I wanted to give people a taste of what one of the features – the Visual Programming Flow Chart - looks like. It’s really pretty simple to use.
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 4 Comments
Monday, July 28, 2008 6:05

trueSpace7.6 FREE Fully-featured 3D Authoring Package

Several months ago Microsoft acquired a company called Caligari largely because of their advanced 3D toolset called trueSpace . Well now the latest version of this powerful tool is available for free . Yes, the favorite price point for educational organizations!
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Friday, July 25, 2008 5:43

Microsoft Visual Studio Middle School Power Toy 1.0

The Microsoft Visual Studio Middle School Power Toy 1.0 was originally created by Microsoft China to help meet the curriculum needs for teaching programming in that country. According to regulations/policies of China’s Ministry of Education (MOE) almost
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 7 Comments
Thursday, July 24, 2008 3:24 PM

Opening On the Academic Relations Team at Microsoft

Have you ever thought “Alfred has an interesting job. I’ll bet I’d like to do that” or perhaps “I’d love to show Alfred how the job could really be done” or even “Boy I’d like to work with Alfred.” Well if so, there is an opening on the academic relations
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
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Thursday, July 24, 2008 5:40

Teaching About Error Messages

Here is a cartoon from Office Offline that reminds me of the sort of messages students used to write. OK maybe they were not that bad. But it was amazing the sort of things students though were acceptable messages. Messages that talked down to people,
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 2 Comments
Wednesday, July 23, 2008 5:27

Examples and Exercises

Leigh Ann Sudol has an interesting post titled The Beauty and Elegance of Computer SCIENCE . In it she talks about what makes a good example or exercise and the difference between an exercise and an example. One thing she leaves out, or perhaps just doesn’t
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 1 Comments
Tuesday, July 22, 2008 11:08

Looking For More Computer Science Teacher Blogs

In my RSS reader (and in my blog roll on the sidebar) I have seven other blogs that focus mostly on high school computer science education. Some of those bloggers post more than others (Tom I’m waiting for another update) but they are all interesting
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 1 Comments
Tuesday, July 22, 2008 6:12

Periodic Table of Videos

It’s a amazing the teaching aids one can find on the Internet these days. How about a short video including a demo on each of the elements in the periodic table? Yep, there it is! The University of Nottingham has created a periodic table of videos that
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 2 Comments
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Monday, July 21, 2008 5:49

Goof Off Monday

I have nothing serious today. I sent something to the AP CS mailing list and got back a lot of out of office messages. I'm guessing a lot of people, especially teachers, are just relaxing these days. So today, just ways to have some fun and avoid real
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 2 Comments
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Friday, July 18, 2008 4:15 PM

Turning Consumers into Creators

One of the talks in the Microsoft booth at NECC that I attended was Jacqueline Russell explaining Popfly. One of the things that hit me was when she said the goal behind what her group was doing was to turn “consumers into creators.” I’ve been thinking
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Friday, July 18, 2008 11:22

Popfly Lessons

There are a lot of very interesting computer science topics that typically have to wait a while before being taught. Or that people have to learn a whole lot of “plumbing” to use. Among these are things like XML, RSS, and using maps (the where things
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 1 Comments
Wednesday, July 16, 2008 3:32 PM

Terrarium Is Back!

If you were around in the early days of the .NET Framework you may remember a game called Terrarium. I believe that Microsoft may even have had a version running at SIGCSE one year. Bil Simser who is bringing it back fresh and updated via a CodePlex shared
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 1 Comments
Tuesday, July 15, 2008 2:16 PM

Interesting Links – 15 July 2008

I am struggling to catch up from my vacation. One of the trailing points in my activity is blogging – both reading and writing. I’ve got over 500 blog posts (mostly in the education category – aren’t you all on vacation?) to read. But I’ve come up with
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Friday, July 11, 2008 6:09

The Four Digit Problem

So I was remembering a piece of code I had to write once. Honestly I don’t remember exactly why I had to write it. I think it may have been part of a set of patterned data for some test software though. In any case the problem was to generate a four digit
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 8 Comments
Thursday, July 10, 2008 6:25 PM

Recursion See Recursion Again

I don’t remember exactly when I learned recursion. If I recall correctly, and I could be wrong after almost 35 years, the version of FORTRAN that was my first programming language didn’t even support recursive subroutine calls. But somewhere along the
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 6 Comments
Tuesday, July 08, 2008 6:31

2D XNA Game Tutorial

Over a the XNA blog they have announced a new 2D game tutorial . Two hours of video and other information. I can’t wait to get back from vacation to check it out (just don’t tell my wife :-) ) var dzone_url = 'http://blogs.msdn.com/alfredth/archive/2008/07/08/2d-xna-game-tutorial.aspx';
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Monday, July 07, 2008 6:57

Teacher Game Institute

So I’m on vacation this week. I’m trying to stay unplugged and away from the Internet. Time to mentally refresh and relax. But I’ve tried to post a few things of interest this week to keep things going. One of the blogs I have really enjoyed reading the
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Friday, July 04, 2008 12:09 PM

Imagine Cup – Student Environment & Technology Competition

The 2008 Imagine Cup finals is currently being held in Paris France. This international competition involves tens of thousands of university students around the world. This year’s theme is "Imagine a world where technology enables a sustainable environment."
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Friday, July 04, 2008 6:44

June 2008 Top Conversations

June was an interesting month with two main topics that generated traffic and conversation. The most conversation was about women in computer science. Women and Minorities in Computer Science had several comments and attracted a lot of readers. But Articles
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Wednesday, July 02, 2008 11:16 PM

NECC 2008 Trip Report

The first thing you have to realize about NECC is that it is huge. There are somewhere between 12,000 and 13,000 attendees and about 4,000 exhibitor staff. There are 8-9 concurrent session slots a day with about 25 sessions in each slot. Plus there are
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 3 Comments
 
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