Interesting Links 10 March 2014

I spent some time last week trying to keep up with what was happening in Austin Texas at SxSWedu and Atlanta Georgia with SIGCSE by watching Twitter. The good news is that I’m less upset about missing SxSWedu than I was before. On the other hand I regret missing SIGCSE even more. Oh well, win some lose some.

At least I have ISTE (also in Atlanta) and the CSTA conference to look forward to this summer. Maybe I’ll see some of the people who follow my blog at one of those conferences. I hope so. As usual I also managed to collect some interesting links to share.

In a post called How hard is programming? Garth Flint breaks down a simple programming assignment and explains just why it is hard for beginners. Great explanation!

HP CodeWars 2014 is one of the really big high school programming competitions. It’s now held in several venues. The team has made available the solutions, datasets, stats, and scores from all sites are posted.

Eugene Wallingford frequently posts some great advice on his blog. Take Small Steps has some really useful advice for programmers. I try to teach this to my students but sometimes it is a tough sell.

One of the most popular presentations at SIGCSE is called Nifty Assignments. You can read about all of the nifty project assignments that have been demo'd at SIGCSE here: http://nifty.stanford.edu/

Accessible yoga for the blind using Kinect Pretty cool!

Get Serious About Computer Science Education is a great editorial by Ken Royal (@KenRoyal)

Den Delimarsky ‏@DennisCode graduates from college soon and will take a fulltime job at Microsoft. Recently he wrote a post looking back on his undergrad years: To the Incoming (and Maybe Current) Computer Science Majors that has a lot of good advice for future university students.

Experts share their views on the "Year of Code" campaign and the best ways to teach children to code.

danah boyd ‏@zephoria is a research at Microsoft Research who has done a lot of work looking at young people on the Internet. She recently published a book called “It’s Complicated” about what she has learned. While you can buy hardcopies you can also get a free soft copy. You can read about the book and why she is giving it away at What’s Behind the Free PDF of “It’s Complicated” (no, no, not malware…)

CS Teaching Tips  and on Twitter @CSTeachingTips Looks interesting. It’s brand new  so I’m going to be keeping an eye on it.

You can find non paying internships or you can study some computer science and find a few good paying internships. Read about some of the top paying internships out there.