Interesting Links 29 October 2012

First it was an earthquake and now they are talking about a hurricane hitting much of the east coast. Some places have been hit hard already. Computers are key to modern weather forecasting and it is a good thing we have them to warn us so we can prepare. Speaking of preparation, I wrote this Sunday afternoon to make sure it would be available Monday morning. Hope you find some good links here.

Have you heard about Coder Dojos? I first read about them on the Blogs@CACM site with an article titled Inside the Coder dojo. They are volunteer operations around the world to introduce young people to various types of coding.  Then I found out (from Kim Wilkens ‏@kimxtom) about the CoderDojo session at GlobalEd12. There are a lot of Coder Dojo links at Kim’s wikipage.

Does your school or district use SharePoint? A lot of schools do and they look pretty plain and uninspired. Some students in Florida build their new website http://www.cat.pcsb.org on SharePoint with a lot of customized work. The students decided on Windows 8 look and used HTML 5, jQuery, Java, CSS and C#. The site is 100% student produced!

Interested in robots? The iRobot company has iRobot SPARK - Starter Programs for the Advancement of Robotics Knowledge. They are on Twitter at  @iRobotSPARK and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/iRobotSPARK

Good news for people looking for careers in software engineering - Demand for software engineers keeps climbing -- and so do the salaries with a 2.5% increase in software engineering salaries in one year. What is the down side? Mark Guzdial writes that Seed corn looking more attractive. Why would people study to teach computer science when there is money to be made in software engineering? Mark also reports that in the UK Graduates to be offered £20,000 to train as computer science teachers Will it work? I wonder.

Similar to Coder Dojos are hackathons.  ‘Hackathon’ Events Proliferate for Student Programmers. I know that Microsoft has been running a lot of hackathons both on college campuses and for professionals in various metropolitan areas. Lots of cool things happening at them.

If you are teaching in high schools you probably know this but if you don’t know Why isn't there more Computer Science in US high schools? this post by Mark Guzdial is a must read.