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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
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
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
Tuesday, June 17, 2008 6:59 AM

Learn How to Create a Popfly Input Box

Ed Dunhill have been running a series on web development on his blog. Recently he wrote a great post on Popfly to teach people how to create a custom input box. Ed’s summary of what the post is about is here: For the purpose of this tutorial we will implement
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Friday, May 16, 2008 1:08 PM

Links from my talk at Stevens Institute of Technology

digg_url = 'http://blogs.msdn.com/alfredth/archive/2008/05/16/links-from-my-talk-at-stevens-institute-of-technology.aspx'; Yesterday I gave one of the keynote talks at Stevens Institute of Technology’s second annual high school computer science workshop
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 5 Comments
Wednesday, February 20, 2008 9:50 AM

DreamSpark - Microsoft Gives Software to Students for Academic Use

OK so it is already all over the blogosphere that Bill Gates announced a new program called DreamSpark to give software to students. (The official press release is here BTW) So I'm kind of late to the party already. Channel 8 is going to be a key source
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 2 Comments
Thursday, January 31, 2008 9:28 AM

More Kids Programming Environments

I'm always looking out for new tools and environments for teaching young people to program. Recently I found a list created by someone else. The list is here and it has a few I haven't read of before. It also has some short one line to one paragraph reviews
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Wednesday, January 23, 2008 9:20 AM

Is Java the Problem?

Recently an article by Dr. R.B.K Dewar and Dr. E. Schonberg called " Computer Science Education: Where Are the Software Engineers of Tomorrow ?" really got some discussion going. The authors brought up a lot of what they see as problems in computer science
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 2 Comments
Tuesday, January 15, 2008 6:28 AM

How To Teach Your Child to Program

Randy Guthrie is a member of my team out west who used to be a professor of Information Systems. He's a very knowledgeable guy and a very good teacher. Recently Randy 's son asked him to teach him about programming. Well it's hard to turn down a request
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 2 Comments
Thursday, December 27, 2007 7:12 AM

Updates on Beginning Programming Languages

I would imagine that a lot of people are looking for interesting things to do with brand new computers this week. Some people are (I hope) looking for ways to teach young people about programming. Or perhaps you are looking for your self regardless of
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 3 Comments
Tuesday, December 04, 2007 3:20 AM

Top November Posts

November was an interesting month in some ways. It seems that when I really lay out an opinion piece it attracts more attention in both readers and comments. At the same time some informational posts quietly attract a lot of readers as well. Is Computer
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Monday, November 26, 2007 7:05 AM

Update on Summer 2008 Alice & Media Computation Workshops

Barbara Conover, Project Manager, Center for Visualization (Alice Grants) sent me the following information about Alice and Media Computation workshops being run this coming summer. If you are interesting in either Alice or Media Computation as good ways
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Monday, November 05, 2007 4:12 AM

My Ideal First Programming Language

Long before I ran into graphical/drag and drop programming languages for kids like Scratch and Alice I was thinking about some thing similar. What I wanted was a tool that allowed a beginner to write their own programs without syntax and syntax errors
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 7 Comments
Friday, November 02, 2007 5:10 AM

Top Posts From October

Well October was an interesting month. In some cases I was pretty good at predicting which posts would get the most interest and in others I was pretty far off. I did think that the free download book on creating websites that sell would be popular but
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Wednesday, October 10, 2007 3:28 AM

My Game Builder - An online tool for building simple games

My Game Builder is a project being developed by David Golds in his spare time. He's either got a lot of spare time or (much more likely given his day job) a lot more smarts and energy than I have. Why? Because My Game Builder is really cool! My Game Builder
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 2 Comments
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