Useful Web Links for Computer Science Teachers

I keep doing sets of links to hand out at various conferences. It seems like every time I do the list comes out a little differently. Some new things. Some things have new addresses. And the order of things changes for the audience. This list is from a pair of handouts I have put together for a high school curriculum panel at Stevens Institute of Technology and for TCEA. Since I’m been working on this I haven’t has as much time to write for the blog. So here’s hoping this serves as double duty.

K-12 Faculty Community Site http://www.microsoft.com/education/FacultyConnection/precollegiate 

A source for curriculum resources, teacher forums, and program announcements

Programming Languages for Beginners

Alice – http://www.alice.org  – A 3-dimensional, drag and drop programming language from Carnegie Mellon University

Kodu - http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/kodu/

A graphical programming tool for younger students.

Scratch – http://scratch.mit.edu  – a light weight 2-dimensional, drag and drop programming language from MIT

Small Basic - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/devlabs/cc950524.aspx

MSDN Academic Alliance http:// www.msdnaa.net

A Microsoft program for schools to get Microsoft Development software for labs, teachers, and students.

DreamSpark for High schools https://www.dreamspark.com/HighSchool/Default.aspx

DreamSpark High School provides professional-level development and design tools to students enrolled in an accredited, secondary educational institution at no charge.

XNA Game Studio Express http://msdn.microsoft.com/xna

Software for developing games for Windows, the Zune and the XBOX 360. Also links to the XNA community with sample code, tutorials and support forums.

Visual Studio Express Editions http://msdn.microsoft.com/Express

Free development tools (IDEs) for Visual Basic, Visual C++, Visual C# and Visual Web Developer

Beginner Developer Learning Center http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/beginner/bb308754.aspx

A web site for people of all ages who want to learn programming and web development. Tutorials, videos, projects and web casts

Microsoft Robotics Studio http://msdn.microsoft.com/robotics

Visual Programming Language for robots, runtime libraries for higher level programming, a 3-dimensional robot simulator with sample simulations, tutorials, and videos

Coding 4 Fun http://blogs.msdn.com/Coding4Fun 

A web site for hobbyists and computer tinkerers - sample projects and information for doing fun and interesting thing with programming; often combined with interesting or unusual hardware

Alfred Thompson’s Blog http://blogs.msdn.com/AlfredTh  Which is of course my real official blog.

Sharing of resources, links, and information of interest to K-12 Computer Science Teachers

The 2009 Alice Symposium – Call For Papers

Just passing this along in hopes that people interested in Alice will see it an take advantage of this opportunity. I have no connection to the conference or the Alice Project. I’m just a fan.

Deadline: March 15th, 2009

The 2009 Alice Symposium

Duke University

Durham, NC

June 17, 2009

Symposium website:

http://www.cs.duke.edu/csed/aliceSymposium2009

The one-day Alice Symposium is June 17, 2009. This symposium is for Alice teachers at levels of instruction ranging from Middle school and High School to College and University.

Note: Two-day workshops will be available before and after the Alice Symposium.

June 15-16: Alice 3 workshop focusing on Alice in AP and CS1 courses

June 15-16: Alice 2.2 workshop focusing on Alice in pre-AP, pre-CS1 and non-majors courses

June 18-19: Media Computation

You are invited to submit a paper or an abstract for the symposium.

All accepted papers will be published in the conference proceedings. We have requested "in-cooperation" status with SIGCSE. If this status is granted, papers will also be made available for publication to the ACM Digital Library.

TOPICS

• Studies involving the use of Alice
• Experience papers
• Nifty Alice teaching ideas
• Interdisciplinary use of Alice
• How to teach with Alice
• Alice use outside of the classroom
• Alice and computing concepts
• Alice and animation
• Other Alice ideas
• There are two types of submissions: Abstracts and Papers.

ABSTRACTS

If you wish to give a presentation, but do not wish to submit a full paper, you may instead submit a 250 word abstract describing what you wish to present. Presenters will have approximately 20 minutes for their presentations, including questions and answers. (Please note that abstracts, while available in the conference proceedings, will not be made available to the ACM Digital Library.)

PAPERS

Papers will undergo a blind reviewing process. Papers must not exceed five pages. Authors will have approximately 25 minutes for their presentations, including questions and answers. Papers submitted should follow the ACM SIG Proceedings format. Information is available from the symposium web site.

Windows 7: To the Beta and Beyond

Something for the IT people at your school or district.

Date: Thursday, February 12th

Time: 11:00am Pacific Time

https://ms.istreamplanet.com/springboard

Join Mark Russinovich and a panel of subject matter experts for a live discussion of what's in store for IT pros with Windows® 7. Learn about the evolution of features like Group Policy, BitLocker™ To Go, DirectAccess, BranchCache™, and Software Restriction then get tips on troubleshooting, deployment, and application compatibility. Bring your questions—Mark and the panel will answer as many as they can during the hour-long event, then publish the rest in a Q&A after the event.

Find answers to your Windows client OS deployment and management questions with resources, tools, monthly feature articles, and guidance from subject matter experts and early adopters. To learn more, visit www.microsoft.com/springboard.

As part of the “virtual” experience, you may submit your questions about Windows 7 Beta to the panel live during the event—or submit questions in advance to vrtable@microsoft.com.

Springboard Series: The resource for Windows desktop IT professionals