Interesting Links 20 April 2015

Daffodils are blooming, golf courses are opening, and buds are appearing on trees and bushes. Looks like we’re going to have spring in New Hampshire after all.  We’re well into the fourth and final quarter at my school. It’s a great time of year. And I have a nice harvest of interesting links to share. Hope you find something you can use here.

Microsoft is usually good about making platforms that can be  developed for so I was pleased but not surprised to see this Developing for the Microsoft Band Link Round-up (Channel 9) If only I could think of an app I wanted to developing I might buy one.

Mark Guzdial on BBC [] giving away 1 million mini computers so kids can learn to code: Prediction — little impact on broadening participation. I put in my two cents at Is the BBC’s ‘Micro Bot’ the Silver Bullet

Code Kingdoms teaches kids JavaScript through a puzzle adventure game: I haven’t played with this yet because it seems to only be available in the United Kingdom. Any one out there have a review for me? 

Ways Men In Tech Are Unintentionally Sexist Some things we need to be aware of in the classroom. Not just we as teachers but also making sure we don’t allow this sort of thing on the part of our students.

I ran into this quote last week. "That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers" - Larry Niven It’s one of those things that makes you really think. What does one mean by a lousy programmer? Is this user interface design? That’s probably part of it. Bug in code? Part of it as well. It’s complicated but something we need to work on both as people who develop code and people who teach people to develop code.

5 Myths Busted About Hackathons and The Maker Community Interesting article. I’m still trying to decide if hackathons are that helpful or not. Opinions?

Great Free Resource to Learn Game Development (Channel 9) Seems like a lot of options are available these days.

As encryption spreads, U.S. grapples with clash between privacy, security This is a topic we have been discussing in some of my classes.

Sheena Vaidyanathan, CSTA Board Rep for K-8, blogs on the CSTA blog about How to prepare educators to teach coding/CS