Monday, July 29, 2013

Interesting Links 29 July 2013

Short week last week as my wife and I headed down to Walt Disney World for a bit of actual real vacation. That doesn’t mean I didn’t collect a good batch of links to share with you today before I left.

Google pilots teaching program in Berkeley County article from the Berkeley Independent. Some of these Google teaching fellows were at CSTA last week absorbing as much as they could. I was happy to see them there as that is a great place to learn. Wish I’d had more time to talk to them though. I’m not sure how this program will work out but I credit Google for trying something.

My time in the High School Computer Science by @DanKasun Dan is one of the people I met at Microsoft who really cares about education and is smart enough to know that he doesn’t know it all. Here he writes about some of the things he learned as a volunteer TA in a HS AP CS course.

I’m collecting resources around image manipulation for use in my honors programming course. Found a couple of new ones to share.

I’m also collecting more Kinect resources. Two articles that look interesting are here.

Really interesting research on how well programmers really understand code. What this article had me wondering was if we as teachers were creating too many trick questions when we should be demonstrating easy to read code. More on that later.

Google's Megan Smith On The 2 Innovations That Will Get More Women Into Tech Google and Microsoft are both concerned about the shortage of people in general and women in particular in the software industry. Both are also trying to do things about it.

The #makered Twitter conversation was about 3D printing. More and more schools are starting to use these devices as they become more affordable. Along the way was this link to Time to Start Making: Free Design Programs for 3D Printers

A Future for Computer Science Education is about the recent CSTA Conference event hosted at and by the Microsoft New England Research & Development Center.

Touch Develop on the Surface by Ray Chambers documents his experiments using TouchDevelop on a Surface.  I have a Windows 8 slate and have found TouchDevelop very easy to use on it.

Summer is not vacation time by Garth Flint @gflint outlines a lot of the behind the scenes work he has to do during the summer to make sure the computers at his school are ready for the new school year.  Most teachers do more over the summer than relax. BTW did you read my interview with Garth Flint earlier this month?

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