Interesting Links December 7 2009

A lot of links last week that anticipate Computer Science Education week came my way. Well you’d expect that and I have a number of them to share. But that’s not all. A little about Silverlight, a little about programming languages, and a little about other things. First though the CSEdWeek links.

Besides Congress there have been other announcements from government and other officials about Computer Science Education Week.

• Wisconsin governor proclaims next week as Wisconsin Computer Science Education Week
• The Superintendent of Los Angeles Unified School District has designated next week as LAUSD Computer Science Education Week

Plus some college.university announcements and web sites.

• Carnegie Mellon University's Computer Science Education Day site is at http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~csed09 All of the talks will be made available over the web after the event.
• Georgia Tech’s Pitch on National CS Ed Week http://computinged.wordpress.com/2009/12/03/georgia-techs-press-pitch-on-national-cs-ed-week/

Now for some additional (beyond what I linked to last week) resource links with ideas on how to celebrate.

• Ideas for celebrating computer science education week from the CSTA blog.
• Brian Scarbeau has been promoting Computer Science Education week for several years now. Check out his CSEdWeek page.

Leigh Ann Sudol sent the following announcement to the APCS mailing list.

Another cool thing is the emergence of Keepon and BeatBots as an internet phenomenon. Keepon is a little squishy robot that was designed to dance to a beat - its breakout video is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPdP1jBfxzo&feature=fvw and an article about how its being used to help autistic children here: http://beatbots.net/2009/04/10/popular-science-robots-to-fight-autism/

How do you feel about free software? Did you know you can download the beta of the next version of Office, Office 2010. http://www.microsoft.com/office2010 So far it has been downloaded over 1,000,000 times.

Interested in Silverlight and games? Coding 4 Fun has a great post on creating a pinball game in Silverlight using the Physics Helper Library + Farseer Physics

Peter Vogel (@PeterVogel) pointed me to an article called Top 10 Programming Languages Used at Microsoft. It’s an interesting list but believe it or not Java isn’t on it. :-)

Interested in getting kids thinking about inventions? Or about how to go from idea to product and company?  From the TCEA Twitter feed (@tcea) comes a link to a fabulous Inventor's Handbook for students from the Lemelson-MIT program.