Interesting Links 22 September 2014

Last week ended with International Talk like a Pirate day. I doubt this would have spread as far as it has without the Internet. Things were very busy for CS education on the Internet last week. I’ve got a lot to share today. I hope you find something useful here.

Last week I learned about Gidget  (thanks to Mark Guzdial) which is a more text based programming environment for teaching programming.

Gidget is a game designed to teach computer programming concepts through debugging puzzles. Gidget the robot was damaged on its way to clean up a chemical spill and save the animals, so it is the players’ job to fix Gidget’s problematic code to complete all the missions. As the levels become more challenging, players can combine newly introduced concepts with previously used commands to solve the puzzles and progress through the game.

The MacArthur “Genius Grants” for 2014 were announced last week. A computer scientist, Craig Gentry who is an IBM Research Scientist in their Cryptography Group was one of the recipients.

I created a short video introduction to operators (math and relational) in C# which you can watch or download from Office Mix - https://t.co/sCpaJGvyNt

Mark Guzdial announced the release of JES 5 (the Jython Environment for Students) It includes: New Jython, Faster, Updated Watcher, with Jython Music.

Karen North is  hosting a Houston Texas area Code Studio workshop (for teachers, grades K-5). 

The 2015 Code Hunt Challenge is part of the Microsoft Imagine Cup competitions.  The first event was over this past weekend but they are running more of them monthly. Worth pointing your students to since they don’t have to go anywhere but the Internet to take part.

You really want to look at this blog post -Wolfram introduces "Tweet-A-Program" – the Wolfram language looks VERY interesting. If you don’t think so yet you will after seeing the examples there.

Microsoft launches Cyberspace 2025 Essay contest for university students navigating the future of cyber security policy:

Today, we’re kicking off this year’s contest, the  Cyberspace 2025 Essay contest.  This year, we want to hear from University students who are conducting original research on how they see the future of cyberspace.  The inspiration for this topic comes from our recently published paper, Cyberspace 2025: Today’s Decisions, Tomorrow’s Terrain, where we consider the impact that such factors as demographics, education, immigration, regulation, technology, collaboration, and even trade will have on the future landscape of cyberspace and cybersecurity.