Monday, February 08, 2010

Interesting Links 8 February 2010

Well did you watch the Super Bowl? I confess that I did not. I’m just not that into football. Still I had a good weekend and as usual I have spent some time looking though my Twitter feed of the last week for interesting things to share. I hope some of you are finding this useful or interesting. It’s serving as a good way for me to track things and record useful (to me) information. And now this weeks list.

Details for this year’s CSIT Symposium details have been released. I’ll be in California this Saturday meeting with the rest of the planning committee as we work out still more details but you can register now. I hope you’ll come. It will be at Google HQ. I think they are an Internet advertising company of some sorts. Doug Peterson (@DougPete) who is one of my favorite people to follow on Twitter is also on the planning committee BTW. So Canada is represented. :-)

@TeachTec sent out this link to a Project Natal video that explains how yesterday’s STEM students are today’s creative wizards. It was created as part of the Connect A Million Minds project which is a Time Warner Cable effort in conjunction with FIRST Robotics and CSAS - The Coalition for Science After School.

Also from @TeachTec - Getting kids to tell their stories and the free teacher's guide to digital storytelling. Share this with a lot of other teachers you know. English/language arts, social studies, you name it.

The  @innovativeteach Twitter account linked to a blog post on their site called AutoCollage - a simple workshop Included in the post is information on how teachers can get AutoCollage for free.

The CSTA Blog had an interesting post called Getting Students to Test Their Programs This seems to be a big problem with some students. They are either unwilling or find themselves unable to really test their programs. Do you see this problem? How do you deal with it?

The CACM blog also has some interesting posts last week. One in particular got to me School pupils' attitudes to programming: "what's that?" How many students stay away from programming because they don’t know what it is? How about students who decide to major in computer science while being clueless about programming? How can we fix that?

Alerted by @blogCACM on Twitter I found this  Bruce Schneier & Marcus Ranum point/counterpoint: "Should we ban anonymity on the Internet?" They spent a little more time just debating if banning anonymity on the Internet is possible than on if it is the right thing to do. But both make interesting discussion topics. Dealing with ethics in computer science in your classroom? If so this may make a great item to talk about.

The @iRobotSPARK account alerted me to both the @roboweek account and to the First annual National Robotics Week which has been announced 4/10-4/18 Besides that article which lists some events already scheduled look up the National Robotics Week home page.

New Learning Resources on the Visual Basic Developer Center (thanks to Beth Massi on the Visual Basic Team Blog)

Today we revamped some of the Visual Basic Developer Center Learn pages with more content that allows you to pivot on more fine-grained topics and tasks related to Visual Basic programming. We’ve started with the Introductory Topics and Language Syntax pages. To get there, head to http://msdn.com/vbasic and then click the Learn tab. There you will see a set of general topic areas to explore.

The US Imagine Cup Twitter @imaginecupus retweeted a message by @LouisIngenthron with a link to a post that shows you how to create a simple endless ocean for an XNA C# game. Just one of the latest posts at Coding 4 Fun.

 

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