Interesting Links 23 September 2013

This weeks quote of the week is from Vicki Davis ‏@coolcatteacher who Tweeted “I don't want my students to buy the apps - I want them to make them.” Isn’t that what most of use want? Students who are creators and not just consumers.

Kinect Games, xGames and TouchDevelop is a post by David Renton which lists a lot of the educational resources he has available on those three topics.

Something a bit different. Perhaps for more advanced students. An Excel Turing Machine Yep, someone created a version of the Turning Machine using Microsoft Excel. You can get a copy and/or read how they did it.

Yep, another competition for students. The Cyber Patriot competition now open. For middle school too.

CyberPatriot is the premier national high school cyber defense competition created by the Air Force Association to inspire high school students toward careers in cybersecurity or other science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines critical to our nation’s future.

I wrote a post for Connected Learning Today called the Education Wow Factor about trying to get kids to say “oh wow” followed by “How can I do that?”

Can you guess the programming language by reading a  “Hello, world!” snippet? There are a lot of languages out there. Some of them look pretty weird to me. Others seem to look the same as each other.

I liked a @YouTube video from Chris Winikka @winikka called Intro to Visual C# Programming Part 1 Chris took a workshop I lead a number of years ago. He’s doing some great stuff now. Probably only coincidence that he took a workshop with me though.

In Boredom Could Kill On-line Programming Education Garth Flint  @gflint comments on some online educational sites. We need to look at these sites with a critical eye to make sure they have the value that their creators hope they have.

Imagining an Imagine Cup project with Kinect? The latest SDK 1.8 update is here and ready for download: http://spr.ly/6017wv29 I’ve started to play with this myself. Some great sample code is included.

September 2013 brought us a Special Issue of IEEE Computer on Computing Education.

A new project, Google's Coder project turns the Raspbery Pi into a mini app server. May have to try this myself.

A Missile Commander Game - a Small Basic Featured Program continues to show off how powerful Small Basic is in spite of its name.

Cloud at ECOO13  via Doug Peterson @DougPete ECOO 13 looks like a great conference for Ontario (and area) educators.

Become a session or workshop presenter at the 2014 CSTA annual conference July 14-15 in St. Charles, IL!