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Tuesday, August 12, 2008 5:31 AM

Teaching the Computer Science Teacher

Garth left a comment on an earlier post of mine that I really think deserves more visibility and discussion. I’ve copied it below (and added some paragraphing): This thread brings up a whole new topic; teacher training. I have a fairly broad based university
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 1 Comments
Friday, August 08, 2008 6:15 AM

Friday Misc Links – August 8 2008

Found a few good nuggets to share with people. Robots If you are in to robots or know someone who is I saw this announcement from the Microsoft Robotics team blog . The RoboChamps Amazed Challenge is over and the winners have been announced. However,
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Thursday, August 07, 2008 4:58 PM

The Language is NOT the Important Thing

Invariably when anyone posts about “the right” programming language to use in a first course a lot of discussion ensues. People are notoriously opinionated about this topic. I am not exempt from this and I admit that I have fallen into this trap in the
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 2 Comments
Wednesday, August 06, 2008 11:27 AM

Teaching Casting

I love a good analogy. Actually I even like so-so analogies. But this one about casting variables from Rob Miles is a particularly good one I think. I can see saying “and now playing the role of an integer is 3.14159” What was that you are asking? Well
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Thursday, July 31, 2008 5:26 AM

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
Tuesday, July 29, 2008 6:25 AM

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
Friday, July 25, 2008 5:43 AM

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
Wednesday, July 23, 2008 5:27 AM

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 AM

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
Friday, July 11, 2008 6:09 AM

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
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
Sunday, June 29, 2008 12:17 AM

Computer Science & Information Technology Symposium 2008

I’ve been to most of the CS & IT symposiums at NECC (and the one at SIGCSE) over the years but today’s was by far the best. Every year the speakers get better. The number and range of sessions gets better. The number of people gets larger (this year’s
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 1 Comments
Wednesday, June 25, 2008 5:53 AM

Articles About STEM Education

Lately (and about time if you ask me) the problem of computer science enrollment in particular and STEM (science, technology, engineering and Math) in general seem to be getting more attention. Here are a couple of articles that people have brought to
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 11 Comments
Thursday, June 19, 2008 5:56 AM

Getting Ready for NECC

It’s just over a week until I head out (down to?) San Antonio for this year’s National Education Computing Conference (NECC). I’ll start on Saturday the 28th with the annual CS & IT Symposium . This year’s event looks to be the best yet. I hope to
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
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