Monday, February 28, 2011

Interesting Links 28 February 2011

Lots of interesting posts by computer science teachers last week. And some news from various sources to share. But let’s start with the teacher blog posts.

Kathleen Weaver writes about her experiences with Programming for Windows Phone 7 for teachers and students. Kathleen has a couple of applications in the Windows Phone 7 app store already and is now introducing her students to Windows Phone development. Looks like fun. I can’t wait to see what her students come up with.

Interesting "find the max" project by Ben Chun (@benchun) There is some really good discussion in the comments about objects early or late and teaching the concepts in general.

Rob Miles (@robmiles ) posted an interesting Programming Puzzler. The useful part is the discussion in the comments. And I see that Rob did add more detail to the post itself since I originally read it. It’s a good discussion question.

My manager Bob Familiar helped Andrew Parsons with a multi-day game development camp at Pace University over the weekend. Bob wrote about it at Get your app on! Students learn XNA and Silverlight Gaming at Pace Game Camp They even has a 12 year old student there who was very successful. Seems like game development doesn’t have to start in high school let alone college. In more Windows Phone 7 development news, read about  My School App: A First (Real) Windows Phone 7 App Project for Beginners. Mark Frydenberg of Bentley University has created and posted a fun and easy first Windows Phone 7 app project on the Microsoft Codeplex: http://myschoolapp.codeplex.com/.

The Microsoft Tech Student Twitter account (@MSTechStudent) has a reminder for us Visual Basic people about Visual Basic Windows Phone 7 Series: How to create a microphone application for Windows Phone 7 using Visual Basic.

Speaking of gaming news – did you hear that a Kinect for Windows SDK to Arrive Spring 2011? Designed for educational and research use by the good folks at Microsoft Research. What will your students do with it?

Under the heading of both fun and educational xkcd takes on the problem of address space http://xkcd.com/865/geek humor at its finest. A possible conversation starter as well.

And this video from the UK, Introducing Nellie the School Computer (1969) shows just what operating a school computer was like in the late 1960’s. You’ll like the way they teach how a binary adder works as well. Something to think about today.

In more Microsoft news,  Microsoft now has local tech news sites for Silicon Valley, Boston, Chicago, and LA .

Last but not least, I see there is a Math 4.0 teacher guide out along with a bunch of other guides including one for Movie Maker that looks useful

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