I don’t know about you but I am enjoying my summer. Keeping very busy though. Really spending some quality time with TouchDevelop. Also working on my presentations for the CSTA Annual Conference which is only a week away! Plus working on curriculum stuff for the fall. To say nothing of all the household tasks I promised my wife “I’ll do it in the summer.” That doesn’t mean I don’t have links to share though so here they are.
I posted a list of my Computer Science educator interviews over the weekend. I’ll keep it updated as more appear. Let me know if you want to take part BTW.
5 Programming Mistakes You Should Stop Making it’s a good list and one worth talking about with students. I plan to.
Small Basic July Challenges! Lots of great project ideas on the Small Basic blog. How did I not know about this excellent resource before now? Following the blog now though.
Want to Change a High School Kid’s Life? Show Them This via @TopCoder
Zero Robotics is a coding challenge and tournament where high school team’s across America write code to operate and fly zero-gravity miniature satellites
Zero Robotics is a game. So as kids are learning to actually program these real world objects, they are playing an extensive game that incorporates strategy, mathematics, computer science, and much more
The on-site finals are hosted at the MIT campus
The finalists have their code sent to the International Space Station where an astronaut will run the programs in a live, finals broadcast from outer space
The entire program is absolutely free
Amplify is creating a massive online open Advanced Placement Computer science course (the first AP Computer Science MOOC). Rebecca Dovi, an experienced APCS teacher, CSTA chapter president, and blogger at Super Computer Science, is teaching the course and spending the summer developing materials. Not everyone is excited about it and you can read about that at AP Computer Science MOOC and make up your own mind.
Learn to develop for Windows Phone 8 in one weekend with Channel 9. I am doing a demo of Windows Phone development at CSTA next week. Looking into doing more of it with my students in the fall as well.
Announcing the $10,000 Poster Design Contest to help girls into STEM! more from @TopCoder
For learning Python, I highly recommend "Think Python: How To Think Like a Computer Scientist" (which is actually on the list twice as two variants of the title...) I used it myself to learn and then made it my course text. It was a bit heavy for my students, but it is thorough and has great exercises. I also worked through quite a few Project Euler problems using Python to learn the basics.
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