Microsoft East Region Bloggers

These days I am part of a larger team than I used to. There are some 22 of use including our manager. Everyone has a blog. This is the complete list.

Name	Blog
Peter Laudati	http://blogs.msdn.com/peterlau/
Rachel Appel	http://RachelAppel.com/downloads
Chris Bowen	http://blogs.msdn.com/cbowen/
Jim O'Neil	http://blogs.msdn.com/joneil
G. Andrew Duthie	http://blogs.msdn.com/gduthie/
David Isbitski	http://blogs.msdn.com/davedev/
Dani Diaz	http://smallandmighty.net/
Glen Gordon	http://blogs.msdn.com/glengordon/
Brian Hitney	http://www.structuretoobig.com/home/
Joe Healy	http://www.devfish.net/
Blain Barton	http://blogs.technet.com/blainbar/
John Baker	http://blogs.technet.com/johnbaker/
Yung Chou	http://blogs.technet.com/yungchou/
Bob Hunt	http://blogs.msdn.com/bobh/
Dan Stolts	http://blogs.technet.com/danstolts/
Ed Donahue	http://www.creepyed.com/
Lindsay Lindstrom	http://blogs.msdn.com/b/lindsay/
Alfred Thompson	http://blog.acthompson.net
Tara E. Walker	http://blogs.msdn.com/tarawalker/
Andrew Parsons	http://blogs.msdn.com/andrewparsons
Edwin Guarin	http://blogs.msdn.com/b/edvangelist
Bob Familiar	http://blogs.msdn.com/bobfamiliar

What is an app?

In the Mobile Game Design and Mobile App Design categories of the NFTE World Series of Innovation students are asked to design an app or a game for a mobile device such as an Windows Phone. But what do an “app” mean in that context?  The meaning of words changes over time. I hear that the word “awful” used to mean the same thing as “awesome” but over time awful was used so often in a sarcastic way that the meaning changed. Seems plausible – true or not. A word today that seems to also be changing meaning is “app.” In general it is a short form of the word “application” as you can see in this partial definition from Wikipedia “Application software, also known as an application or an "app", is computer software designed to help the user to perform specific tasks. ” Increasingly though the word app is used as a short form of “mobile application” or “mobile app.” That’s a nuanced meaning to some but I think “app” is starting to have a narrower more specific usage than a short form for the more general term “application.” If I had to define it I might say something like “a small application with a simple to use user interface for performing one or more closely related activities. Generally on a mobile computing device.”

What we are talking about for the NFTE World Series of Innovation are small application not some huge monolithic application like one would add memory to their high powered desktop to run.

NFTE is proud to have Microsoft as the presenting sponsor of the World Series of Innovation. Microsoft is issuing a challenge for students to create mobile phone apps and games that raise awareness and provide solutions for common student and school issues. Microsoft will provide the winning teams with a development partner to take the idea and bring it to market.

The other thing about apps is  that they tend to be personal. By that I mean they are designed to be useful for individuals. Apps help people find their way, help them get information from online sources, and in short help them solve personal problems. Here are some sample ideas for apps from the NFTE World Series Toolkit that teachers receive after registering:

• Helping new students find their way around a school
• Making friends and building the school community
• Managing school and class schedules
• Dealing with bullying
• Improving the school grounds (cleaning it, building new features)
• Improving school safety
• Helping students and schools protect and improve the environment
• Help students get and stay healthy
• Simple learning games—helping students learn subjects (math, geography, science, history)

Here is an example of a simple app that students might want to create (or use themselves!)

Nearly every school publishes a handbook, and most have web sites that contain important information, such as school directory, maps, class information, athletics,
latest news, and other details that are important to students. When people aren’t at a computer, however, it’s often difficult to get this information. In addition,
school administration and faculty need a quick, centralized way to get new information out to students and parents.

MySchoolApp is a Windows Phone app that provides school information to students and parents, such as news, school events, important links, faculty
directory, and school maps. School administrators can publish information and notifications via the app as easily as updating their school web site.
Windows Phone users can download the version for Bentley University here: http://bit.ly/nftebentley

MySchoolApp gives you access to school news, faculty directory, school calendar, maps, sports, alerts, and notifications—right from your smartphone! It’s great
for students and parents, as they can get the information anytime and anyplace, and it’s great for schools as it will help them communicate information quickly
and efficiently.

It’s simple, handy (a lot easier to carry as part of your phone than a hard copy paper book), and useful with timely information. What sorts of apps can your students design? The NFTE World Series of Innovation encourages that with the possibility of having the winning design turned into a real app for use by students everywhere.

Some additional links that may be useful:

• Microsoft DreamSpark: Free software for student developers
•  Microsoft Imagine Cup: A world-wide competition for students 16 and older
• Microsoft Innovative Educator Forum: a global community of educators using technology in innovative ways to improve the quality of learning
  

Interesting Links September 6 2011

Labor Day in the US means a three-day weekend and I took advantage of it.  I’d like to make note of a couple of my recent posts that seem to have more in common now that I read all the comments on them than they did initially.

• Readability in Programming Languages - 30+ comments including some pointing out that wordy languages are not always so readable to non English speakers
• Why are all programming languages in English? – 93 comments Something to make you think there for sure.
• Languages That Make You Think – 6 comments that bring up more languages and they way they make you think

Together I think they form the basis for a long discussion about programming languages, internationalization, ease of learning vs. ease of use and generally what are the philosophical and other social aspects of programming language design. It’s more than just technical questions.

Interested in adding some cloud computing to your mobile device development? From Mark Hindsbo (@mhindsbo) I see that Microsoft has released an Azure toolkit to help bring the cloud to all devices with Android tools just released to join tools for iPhone and Windows Phone.

Stuart Ball (via  @Innovativeteach) announces more great Kinect stuff from the UK Partners in Learning Teachers K Team.

The latest ISTE SIG for Computer Teachers newsletter (PDF) is now available. As always some good information there. I’ve been a member of ISTE and SIGCT for years and find it well worth my time and energy BTW.

Last week marked the 20th anniversary of Microsoft Research (MSFTResearch) where they are doing all sorts of cool stuff. Scott Lum (@scottlum) pointed me at this In-depth look inside Microsoft Research and their nerdy research projects  via Wired Mag

Speaking of Microsoft Research (MSFTResearch ) last week they Tweeted a suggestion that people “Check out .NET Gadgeteer, a rapid prototyping device developed by Microsoft Research, now available commercially.” It’s a great new way to create programmable devices. Lots of good educational possibilities.

The ever creative Vicki Davis (@coolcatteacher) blogged about “Our Freshman Software Exploration Project (6 Days of Wonder)” Of course I found her discussion of how they use Microsoft OneNote particularly interesting but she has more stuff as well. OneNote is one of Microsoft’s lesser known gems with huge value in education.

Chris Bowen (@ChrisBowen) is a developer evangelist at Microsoft and a great guy. He recently announced an upcoming New England Code Camp 16 - October 29th, Waltham, MA - Save the date! While most attendees are professional developers the sessions are wide ranging and I suspect a lot of educators and STUDENTS will find value in attending. Check out Chris’ blog post for more information.

Want to become an entrepreneur? Watch @IEEEtv’s  Young Entrepreneurs video sponsored by @Microsoft to learn what you need to make it happen.

A couple of regular links to Microsoft’s Tech Student blog

• Windows Phone Student App of the Week: Draw Pad
• August Tech Student of the Month - Phillip Huff

Interesting post on Ethical hacking on the CSTA blog Follow them on Twitter at @csteachersa

Great article about Serious Play Conference & Microsoft taking the "Productivity Games" approach to Education

Girls Go Geek… Again! - Fog Creek Blog a great reminder that programming was once “women’s work” and that we really need to get women back into software.

Interesting Links 29 August 2011

Hurricane Irene was the big news on the east coast of the US and parts of the Caribbean last week. Oh and there was a surprising east coast earthquake last week as well. Quite some week. But I still managed to collect some links to share. If you were in the storm area I hope you weathered the storm.

The new  Microsoft in Education blog aggregates blog posts from a number of the education related blogs by Microsoft people and teams. This blog is one of them but there are many more. From this blog I found a link to a post on the Office in Education blog called A teacher’s thoughts on Windows SkyDrive (video)  If you don’t use SkyDrive for cloud storage and sharing with others check out that video.

The latest in a series of videos by the people at Channel 9 focusing on tours of the Microsoft campus show how the Building 4 remodel made room for The Garage. Don’t miss the special Coca Cola machine they have there. Pretty much every flavor Coca Cola has in one machine.

For some kids, back to school means back to cyberbullying. Microsoft is helping to Stop Cyberbullying – Read more about it on the official Microsoft blog.

I found this post at the Communications of the ACM blog pretty interesting - Password Policies are Getting Out of Control  There are lots of discussion points there especially around the trade offs between ease of use and security.

Ed Donahue collected a bunch of links to Windows Phone 7 icons libraries. If you are developing for Windows Phone 7 you may find these links particularly useful

Check this video out -- Microsoft U.S. Education CTO, Cameron Evans interviews Johnny Kissko,  Johnny is doing some interesting things with Kinect in the classroom. Speaking of Johnny be sure to check out his Kinect in Education website.

Start with this blog post titled  Kinect in Education: How to Create Content-Relevant Games

Last but not least, from @SpringboardBlog a blog post by one of our summer high school interns - Windows Phone Student App of the Week: Free Dictionary

      

Interesting Links 20 August 2011

No out of the area travel for me last week. It was nice to sleep in my own bed every night. This is not to say that I wasn’t busy. I had some meetings with the people at FIRST robotics for example. They are doing some pretty interesting things with technology these days. They are a Microsoft shop and their whole operation runs on Microsoft software including their impressive field management system for their competitions. It’s always exciting to hear what they are up to. I also kept my eyes open for interesting things to share and have a reasonable list again this week. Hopefully you find some of it useful.

Microsoft runs a small high school internship program mostly in the Redmond WA home office. Recently Hélène Martin (aka @purplespatula on Twitter) wrote about her student’s summer as Microsoft High School Interns 

In a change of pace from strictly computer science related things here is a post on Microsoft software for various college majors  Just in time for back to school and lots of it relevant for high school students as well.

Great minds need great notebooks. See how OneNote could've helped make a better light bulb A fun little look at how OneNote can be used.

New Book: FRIENDLY F# through Game Development and XNA Looks interesting for people interested in this powerful functional language and game development.

Super-Detailed First (MashUp)Windows Phone 7 App Walkthrough –this post by Randy Guthrie shows one easy way to create Windows Phone apps.

New Blog Post from one of our Microsoft high school interns is  Windows Phone Student App of the Week: Liverpool Chants Lite, Juventus Chants Lite, Barca Chants Lite These are football (soccer for us Yanks) chants for various British teams.

Nice article about a pilot teaching programming in High Schools using Microsoft .NET Gadgeteer. This hardware is coming soon and it looks like it will find a place in a lot of schools over time.

Official Building Window 8 twitter account at @BuildWindows8 The official Building Windows 8 blog is at http://blogs.msdn.com/b8 So if you are interested in keeping up with the official news on Windows 8 now you know where to look.

There is a new computer science teacher blog out.  Check out Doug Bergman's new blog. He's an innovative educator & part time alligator catcher. I met Doug this summer and am enjoying his posts so far.

You’re seen all sorts of work cloud generators in the past but how about one that works on source code? Well there is a Source Code Word Cloud Generator out now. I’ve only played with it a bit but I see some interesting potential here. And some fun.

Don’t forget about Windows Phone Mango Jump Start developer training August 23-24! Register for LIVE & FREE expert-led training from Rob Miles & Andy Wigley. I understand it will be recorded but the video will not be available for a couple of weeks. So if you are in a hurry to learn try and attend while it is live.

Ready or Not–New School Year About To Start

Well according to my Twitter feed a lot of schools in the US south are back to school. Teachers are reporting for duty and students are expected any day now. My post from 2007 called What Do You Do the First Day of Class is getting a surprising amount of traffic. Posts with programming projects (that link brings up a list of posts tagged for projects or visit my Interesting Projects–A Collection post) are also getting more than the usual amount of traffic. So I’m pretty sure that a lot of people are getting ready for the new school year. Maybe you are all ready for school. Maybe you are not. Maybe you are one of those people who just never starts preparing. But ready or not students are going to be showing up soon. Are you excited?

If you do nothing else I urge you to get excited. If you can’t actually be excited, summer is after all hard to give up, please prepare to act excited for your student’s sake. As the expression goes “fake it until you make it.” Students are going to assume that if the teacher isn’t excited about what they are teaching that they don’t need to be excited either. That can be a poor way to start off  the school year.

I’m excited about the new school year. I hope to visit more schools and talk to more students than ever before. If you are in the New England area and would like a guest speaker let me know and we’ll see what we can work out. Perhaps for Computer Science Education Week? (see a recent CSTA blog post on CS Ed Week for more ideas and the CS Ed Week website for resources.)  This can be a great week for expanding knowledge of and interest in your school’s computer science courses.

How are you fixed for software? For you labs make sure you have a subscription to MSDN AA for great professional level software from Microsoft. And make sure you sign up your school for DreamSpark. More software than even you geekest student can use all of – and for FREE! Doesn’t get much better than free. The image below only shows some of what is available.

Curriculum resources? Visit the Faculty Connection page and load up on free curriculum resources. XNA for game development? We’ve got it! And more coming. Expression Studio for web design courses? We’ve got that too! Kodu for the very young? Got it! Small Basic for middle school and high school? Got that too! In fact check out this post for Microsoft software for various college majors Just in time for back to school and much of it useful in high school as well as college.

There are a lot of resources out there and a lot of them are free. Take advantage of as many as you need or can use. Let’s get students excited! Have a great school year everyone!

Windows Phone Development Training Online

SO you probably know that a new version of the Windows Phone software is coming very soon. If you are planning on teaching phone development you may also be thinking “I wonder how I can get some training on this?” Well you are in luck. Online training is coming!

“Mango” Jump Start! Aug. 23-24! Pass it on…

That's right, Microsoft MVPs Rob Miles and Andy Wigley are back! Microsoft Learning hosted a Windows Phone 7 Jump Start (plus an update course) last year and it was an absolute smash. Mobile application developers raved about the fast-paced, demo-rich approach, the timeliness of real-world content on new technology, as well as the engaging and often-times humorous delivery. Now that "Mango" has made such a huge splash, they have put together another great course.

This two-day live virtual class, Building Applications for Windows Phone Mango Jump Start, is specially tailored for developers looking to build cool applications and games for the new Windows Phone Mango Platform.

Dates: August 23-24, 2011
Time: 8:00am – 4:00pm PST
Duration: 8 hours/day, including hour lunch break
Registration Link: http://bit.ly/Mango-Jump

Mango is an important leap forward in Microsoft’s overall mobile strategy and the developer community has taken notice. Now is the time to embrace the “tile-and-app” UI and reap the rewards Mango provides your development team and user community. Here's an overview of what Rob and Andy will cover:

Day One — August 23, 2011 | 8am-5pm PDT | Live online training
• Building Windows Phone Apps with Visual Studio 2010
• Silverlight on Windows Phone – Introduction
• Silverlight on Windows Phone – Advanced
• Using Expression to Build Windows Phone Interfaces
• Windows Phone Fast Application Switching
• Windows Phone Multi-tasking & Background Tasks
• Using Windows Phone Resources (Bing Maps, Camera, etc.)

Day Two — August 24, 2011 | 8am-5pm PDT | Live online training
• Application Data Storage on Windows Phone
• Using Networks with Windows Phone
• Windows Azure and Windows Phone
• Notifications on Windows Phone
• XNA for Windows Phone
• Selling a Windows Phone Application

Innovative Education Forum–Judging Day

Wow! Just WOW! I spent yesterday judging teacher projects as part of the US Innovative Educator Forum in Redmond. It was absolutely inspiring. In fact I would go as far as to say this was the most encouraging day in regards to American education I have ever spent. And yes that includes learning about some great things at various ISTE conferences. Yes, that is strong but I mean it. There were 70 some projects (read a brief on each of them at 2011 U.S. Innovative Educators Forum Day 1–A Brief Summary) with teachers from kindergarten through high school, public schools, private schools, charter schools, rich areas, poor areas, and all sorts of geographies. The common factors though were dedicated teachers doing innovative things to improve learning for their students. Knowing there are teachers like this who are sharing their ideas with others is very encouraging to me.

Clearly all these teachers love their students, they love teaching, and they are fearless in trying new things. Another common factor is putting some trust in their students. Even second grade students (a couple of examples come to mind) have teachers allowing their students a role in decision making. The results are impressive. The one question that always comes up is “will this impact standardized test scores?” As anyone in education knows standardized tests are far from a great way to judge learning. But as one teacher told me “just because it is on the standardized test doesn’t mean it has to be boring.” So true. Good teaching is not boring. In fact I would argue, and I think many of the teachers here would agree, the less boring the more learning goes on.

So what else is going on? The day yesterday started with an opening keynote by John Medina author of

Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School (9780979777745): John Medina: Books

John also gave a keynote at the most recent ISTE conference. If you ever get a chance to hear him speak you should take advantage of it. He is dynamic, funny, and informative. I bought a copy of his book and had him sign it for me. It is my airplane reading for the trip home tomorrow. He talked about two of the 12 “rules” from his book and I can’t wait to dig into the rest of them. I think there are lessons for educators (and others) in that book. It was a great start to the day.

Then we had the judging. I visited nine assigned projects and several others. I only wish I had had time to talk to all of the teachers. I also wish we could have had a lot more people in to hear these teachers talk about their projects. From conversations I had with teachers it appears that most of the teachers here (including the educators who are judges – which is most of them – list here) did a lot of networking and learning from each other. The thing I heard most was “I have learned so much.” People are going home with many more ideas then they came with.

The judging team meet first in small groups and then as a large group to discuss the projects and highlight those that were on the tops of people’s lists. Note that all of the projects were great so we are looking for the best of the best not separating wheat from chaff by any means. All of these teachers are amazing! I don’t know who the winners are yet. We’ll find out that tonight. A total of ten teams in several categories will be headed for the worldwide event in November. I need to get me an invitation.

Later today we will have a closing keynote by Jane McGonigal, director of Game Research and Development, Institute for the Future and author of

Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (9781594202858): Jane McGonigal: Books

I have heard her speak before and I am sure she will be both interesting and thought provoking. After that we have some more social events with the awards gals closing the day and the event. I’ll post links to the winners once I have them.

Are your students entered in the Windows Phone app contest

This Summer, build Windows Phone 7 apps and you could earn exciting prizes to catch a movie, eat ice – cream, buy camping gear and more!! This special competition is especially for students. It’s a great incentive to get creative and do something interesting and possibly win some prizes and make some money. The software is free through DreamSpark as well!

Lots of chances to win:

* The first 1,000 students to publish will receive a copy of Halo Reach®, Fable 3®, Dance Central™, Kinect Joy Ride or Kinect Sports game for the Xbox 360®. Each week we will randomly select 2 winners from among all entries received to win one $25 gift card. At the close of the sweepstakes the student with the most approved apps published to the marketplace will receive a Windows Phone 7.

Interesting Links 5 July 2011

Wow! What a week it has been. I came home from ISTE in time for the Fourth of July holiday. I’m still mulling over all I heard and learned at ISTE. If things ever quiet down I’ll try to write some of them up. As it was I spent a lot of the long weekend doing work around the house. Yes, we computer geeks do things other than play with computers and the Internet. I installed kitchen cabinets for example. And some yard work. The best of the weekend was spending time with family though. I am putting this post together from Rapid City, South Dakota where I am visiting the SD Schools of Mines and Technology and their wonderful program for native American students. I will be judging some software designed and written by the students. Should be fun. And now a few links.

First off it was great to see Note-Taker, Imagine Cup finalists, win an IDEA Design Award  These students are not just doing software that is for a contest but are writing software to change lives so it is great to see them get even more recognition. Speaking of the Imagine Cup, have you voted for you favorite Imagine Cup team today?http://www.imaginecup.com/pca Come on - you know you want to. The teams from the US need some more love. They have great projects and we should all show them that we are supporting them against the rest of the world.

And Andrew Parsons has some updates on the Imagine Cup game competition:

• Presentation Order - Game Design Imagine Cup 2011
• The last piece of the judging panel puzzle

Over in the UK they had a big Kinect for Windows event and the team put up a great blog post with lots of videos. Be sure to check it out if you are interested in where this Natural User Interface device is going.

Speaking about Kinect, visit the new Microsoft Kinect in Education web site to see what we are thinking about in that space.

One last link, this one from ISTE, they have released the new NETS for Computer Science Educators (pdf)

Interesting Links 20 June 2011

This time next week I will be in Philadelphia for ISTE. I’m pretty excited about it. Some really great things going on there. Plus I get to see a lot of people face to face. many of these people I have met in person before but many of them I will be meeting face to face for the first time after interacting with them through this blog, through Twitter, and through email. The face to face meetings are the best! If you will be at ISTE I hope you will look me up either at the Microsoft booth or one of the sessions I am attending. I will be at a number of the SIGCT promoted events and several bigger Microsoft events. I’ll have a full “what is Microsoft doing at ISTE” with an emphasis on what I’m up to (hey it is my blog ) tomorrow but if you want a jump start visit the Microsoft at ISTE page now. And now for some more links.

Myra Deister, CS and math teacher and member of the CSTA Board of Directors, asks how to you set your Priorities for making sure everything gets done. She notes that teaching computer science takes more time than teaching math. Is that the same for everyone I wonder?

Challenge, discovery, insight, surprise: Rader & Grzeda AP Students accepted ‘missions’ in InterroBang that had an impact in the community and once completed, each ‘deed’ was given points correlating into the grading process.

In case you missed it, Microsoft released the beta of a supported software development kit for the Kinect Sensor device for use with Windows. (I wrote about it here) Earlier when the news that this SDK was first coming one of the demos what a drivable lounge chair that was controlled by hand motions and a Kinect. Last week those nice people at @coding4fun released information about how to do it yourself  -  Jellybean, the Kinect Drivable Lounge Chair Do you have a robotics or engineering program as well as a programming course? This may be the cross curriculum idea or at least the germ of a whole bunch of new ideas.

In computer history news,  IBM turned 100 last week. Yes, the former Calculating Tabulating and Recording company has been around since long before computers. 

Lastly, the Microsoft Feed web site (on twitter @Microsoft_Feed) did an email interview with me and posted it at  Meet Alfred Thompson. IT came out pretty well if I do say so myself.

Share Kodu Cup Winners Announced

Today the Unlimited Potential team announced the winners of the inaugural US Kodu Cup competition.

Today we are announcing the winners of the first U.S. Kodu Cup. It’s a competition that challenged kids across the United States (from the age of 9 to 17) to use Kodu – a free game development tool from Microsoft – to create their own video game for the chance to win great prizes and the chance to attend the Imagine Cup World finals in New York City in July.
Kodu was created by FUSE labs in Microsoft Research to help children learn how to use computers while developing useful skills such as problem solving, creative thinking and planning in a fun, engaging and creative way. Kodu is proving to be a great took for fostering children’s interest in exploring a career in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM).

There were some surprises in the entries – namely that students found things to do and ways to use the tool that the people who created it had never thought about. And of course there was amazing creativity and a lot of hard work in evidence. That makes the results even more exciting to me. I love the themes of the winning entries as well. The entry by Hannah Wyman 10 years old, from Massachusetts, had a theme around saving the environment by planting trees and getting soot out of the air. A very creative game for sure. You can see her video below but visit the Unlimited Potential blog post to see more of them.

More information on Kodu and STEM education

• Kodu game lab site
• Kodu Cup web site
• Blog: Making games can contribute to learning
• Blog: Can kids love math and science more than ice cream?
• STEM whitepaper (PDF)

A Collection of Good Posts

My friend Edwin Guarin (aka the EdVangelist) has been busy this week and I wanted to send out some link love to some really interesting posts he has written.

1. Some cool Windows Phone apps made by college students using AppMakr…
2. Microsoft honored as one of the “Best Places to Work” in Boston!
3. A great example of teaching the cloud (rather than just using it).
4. Course on Surface Development at UMASS Lowell
5. Windows Phone 7 Development in high school!
6. If you’re developing Windows Phone 7 Applications, and want to make $$$…

Some good stuff there. And something for everyone.

Imagine Cup Game Design Competitors 2011

Andrew Parsons has been working hard to highlight the top teams in this year’s worldwide Imagine Cup. He has a series of blog posts which I highly recommend.

The first one is a set of three articles highlighting the finalists for the three tracks of Game Design. These are the fifteen teams from all over the world heading to New York City in July to compete head to head. Definitely worth checking these out:

Meet the finalists – XNA – http://bit.ly/ICGD11k
Meet the finalists – Mobile – http://bit.ly/ICGD11l
Meet the finalists – Web – http://bit.ly/ICGD11m

The second set is a series of ten articles that showcases all competitor entries from the final online round of Game Design. There are more than 100 games shown in this series from dozens of countries and it’s a great resource to show off the variety of game genres, styles, and themes.

Part 1 - http://bit.ly/ICGD11a (_dreamBender – BJTU_YF703)
Part 2 - http://bit.ly/ICGD11b (Bliizz – CodeOne)
Part 3 - http://bit.ly/ICGD11c (CrashGames – EnvoSeven1)
Part 4 - http://bit.ly/ICGD11d (exporithm – Geekologic)
Part 5 - http://bit.ly/ICGD11e (GimmeGimmes – INFOSTROY)
Part 6 - http://bit.ly/ICGD11f (Ingesub Game Lab Team Rocket – Luskanya)
Part 7 - http://bit.ly/ICGD11g (Milworms – Pyro)
Part 8 - http://bit.ly/ICGD11h (Quegee Team – SDEG)
Part 9 - http://bit.ly/ICGD11i (Signum Fidei – Team Nucleus)
Part 10 - http://bit.ly/ICGD11j (Team Rubic – WickedTeam)

Interesting Links Post 31 May 2011

Since yesterday was Memorial Day I posted something just a bit fun and saved my links post for today.  I hope those of you in the US enjoyed a three day weekend and also found time to remember those men and women who paid the ultimate sacrifice for our country. I spent time with family including my World War II combat veteran father. I cherish all the time I have left with him as so many of his generation are now gone.

Now for some links.

Here is a bit of the real world of software development that they don’t teach you in school. This was tweeted and retweeted a lot last week. “ And the award for "Most Legally Encumbered Hello World Program" goes to Oracle for http://goo.gl/gpWFR” A few lines of code and a lot of lines of legal boilerplate.

A number of good articles in the Microsoft Boston blog including this one about how  Microsoft’s Elevate America Community Initiatives are making a difference in the lives of Bostonians.  And this All About the Boston MTC – Q&A with Sven Ingard, MTC Director The MTC is one of Microsoft’s interesting field offices that works with customers before large projects get rolling.

The big summer doings for Microsoft’s international academic relations teams are the 124 student teams who  are competing to solve the world's toughest issues. See GOOD Magazines' favorite five projects

New Game Development Education on App Hub for the Windows Phone Mango Tools Release. This is where I am learning things for my posts like  XNA and Visual Basic–Your First Lesson and  Windows Phone 7 Games in Visual Basic

Have you read about the Microsoft Tech Student of the Month for May 2011?  – Kevin Ballinas

I saw this interesting Tweeted link from @weemooseus “Red Hot: The Computer Science Job Market: (Ok HS, where are your CS teachers when your students need them?)” In spite of news stories like this I keep hearing of schools cutting back on computer science education. It doesn’t make any sense to me.

 

Imagine Cup WorldWide Game Competition Finalists 2011

Andrew Parsons is the Game Capitan for the Worldwide Imagine Cup Game competition. This gives him a good close look at the competitors especially the finalists. This week he has posted summaries of the finalists in the three competition fields.

• Imagine Cup Web Games
• Imagine Cup Mobile Games
• Imagine Cup Xbox Games

I grabbed some of the information about the US teams in the finals but you’ll want to take a look at all the other competitors in all three categories.

Team Name: ICsquared

Game Name: Embryonic

Country: United States

Embryonic is a combination of arcade style games to promote awareness and education of maternal health. The primary game is an Asteroids-style game where the player is put in charge of protecting an unborn child while later levels revolve around other parts of the process, including the umbilical cord and nutrients being delivered, as well as an awareness of rudimentary genetics.

Team Name: Team Dragon

Game Name: Azmo the Dragon

Country: United States

Azmo the Dragon is a 2D side-scrolling game that helps children learn about their asthma as they play as a dragon who destroys civilizations.

Interesting Links 23 May 2011

Every week end I go to grab by Twitter stream and the notes I have taken as ask myself “Do I have any thing interesting this week?” Invariably I have more than I expected. Stuff flows like crazy many weeks. While I pass a lot of it back out via Twitter I find that that is a transient media. Oh it’s great if you have time to follow it (and I don’t always) but you are bound to miss a lot. It also doesn’t feel like a good archive either. So something may come by while you don’t need it but not be easy to find when you do. That is why I believe that these weekly posts are a better way for me (and I hope others) to find things when I need them. Blogs are searchable.

Tara Walker recorded an hour long workshop on building Windows Phone apps that is now available for viewing. May be a good way for you (or students) to get started.

Coding for Fun (@coding4fun) posted some resources for the "graphically challenged" among us with places we can get resources that can be used in XNA games. Trust me – your programming students are probably not the graphic artists them may think they are. These are useful resources.

Learning to learn Is a great post by Garth, a CS teacher and frequent commenter on this blog, who does what good teachers do - help students to learn how to learn more. I recommend this post and Garth’s blog in general.

Have you students seen the big summer deal from Microsoft? Qualified students who buy a new Windows PC and get a free Xbox 360, too. For your graduating seniors – every dorm room can use a new Windows PC and an Xbox 360.  

Programming concepts in Scratch is a very helpful post from Gail Carmichael (@gailcarmichael) . If you are using Scratch or looking into using Scratch for teaching computer science or programming concepts check out her post.

Some interesting things from Microsoft Research (@MSFTResearch:) this week  How much energy is your computer really using? Download Joulemeter and find out. May be just the thing to spark conversations about power usage of computers and how that impacts both society in general and computer hardware design in specific.

Teachers looking to attend Microsoft’s Innovative Educators Forum this summer have created videos. There is a people’s choice voting now open and you can vote for your favorite People's Choice video – Two most "liked" videos go to MSFT Innovative Educator Forum  ( via @TeachTec)

Great article by @Dean Kamen on @CNN : Want U.S. to keep tech edge? Teach kids science

Insightful post by Mark Guzdial (@guzdial) If you want CS in High School, Require CS in college  You have to wonder why don’t more colleges require some computer science? They require math and other sciences. CS is pretty key to the future of almost all fields. If they did require it in college, as Mark says, a lot more high schools would jump to teach it.

I had to link to this video -- 5 year old & Visual Studio – In it a five year old explains why “she likes” Visual Studio 2008. It’s funny, its cute, but there is a lot about what is in the product shown in the video.

Sitting = Bad is an info graphic posted by Ed Donahue (@CreepyEd) about how bad sitting is for you. I have been thinking about a standing desk myself. I’ve also read some things that suggest that standing desks might be helpful for the sort of student who just can’t sit still as well. Either way some things to think about.

One last thing, if you are on Twitter I hope you will follow my updates at @AlfredTwo Thanks!

      

Seth Godin Needs To Visit a Library

Now I am married to a school librarian so a) I have a bias toward them and b) I have a bit of an idea of how they think and how libraries operate. OK not all libraries or all librarians but at least one really good one. So I had to read this post by Seth Godin (The future of the library)

In that post he describes a future librarian that sounds a lot like my wife and a library that sounds a lot like the library she is always working towards. But what Seth misses is the reason librarians still need to fight for sharing and borrowing on eBook readers. In a word – access.

It’s all nice and fuzzy to say you can get everything you need on the Internet if you have a nice set of Internet connected devices and good access to the Internet everywhere you go. And Seth probably has that. Many of the patrons of most libraries, especially the libraries that serve poor and rural areas do not have those things. For these patrons even inexpensive books are outside their price range and 24/7 Internet access is still the realm of science fiction. For these readers the loan of an eBook reader is a door into future possibilities. If librarians do not fight to get them access to this technology and to the information on them they may never get to see it.

Also librarians have for the most part redefined themselves away from guardians of books to sharers of information. (well the good ones anyway)They have embraced media of all types from eBook readers to videos (online and on hard media), online databases to Internet searches. They are all about helping people find information and entertainment (yes people do read for entertainment). There are lots of computers in most libraries. It’s still hard to take those computers home though and if someone doesn’t have a computer at home (or Internet) than eBook readers are yet one more tool in the librarian’s toolbox.

Seth says:

Librarians that are arguing and lobbying for clever ebook lending solutions are completely missing the point. They are defending library as warehouse as opposed to fighting for the future, which is librarian as producer, concierge, connector, teacher and impresario.

Librarians are not missing the point. Seth is missing the point. Librarians do see themselves as “producer, concierge, connector, teacher and impresario” and have for years. Seth misses the point that librarians are about access and sharing by almost any means or media possible. They are not defending the library as warehouse but the library as a source for information sharing. And that is something  you would think Seth would be onboard with.

Interesting Posts 16 May 2011

Computer Science teacher Pat Yongpradit  seems to be everywhere on the educational blogosphere lately. I posted about his 5-6 week XNA course curriculum last week. Vicki Davis (@coolcatteacher) posted an interview on her  Cool Cat Teacher Blog posted a video interview him - Attracting Girls to Technology and Science. Pat himself had a post on the Huffington Post about My Year as a Teacher Beauty Queen: Microsoft Innovative Educator Forum in which he recounts some of what has happened to him since he was involved with last year’s Microsoft Innovative Educator Forum.

Speaking of the Microsoft Innovative Educator Forum, IEF awardee Cheryl Arnett has a new blog post in the Huffington Post called Learn how to transform education to meet the needs of 21st century learners.

I like this article by a pair of Advanced Placement  English teachers in Virginia who utilize InterroBang (@playinterrobang) in their classroom. The article is  "Challenge, Discovery, Insight, Surprise" and they wrote about it for Best In Tech Today

Play InterroBang

@playinterrobang
The socially-networked, mission-based, problem-solving game in partnership with the Exploratorium, Learn and Serve, sponsored by Microsoft
http://playinterrobang.com/

 

Nice blog post by Ed Donahue on the recent Digigirlz Tech Camp: Baltimore 2011. DigiGirlz is a wonderful program designed to help introduce girls and young women learn about and develop an interest in technology and careers in technology.

Have you ever wondered how committees select what presentations are included in a conference? On the CSTA blog you can read Choosing CS&IT Conference Sessions about how sessions were selected for this summer’s Computer Science & Information Technology Conference in New York. BTW you really want to attend this conference if you are a high school (or middle school) computer science teacher or district curriculum coordinator charged with building CS programs.

I don’t often post to my blog over the weekend but this past Saturday I did write a blog post:  about  Returning Data From A Second Form in Visual Basic and/or C# If your students are looking at using multiple forms or building custom dialogue forms that post will be useful.

Are you interested in images of historical devices? Checkout the Buxton Collection 30 Years of Interactive Technology.

Lastly I want to link to a few posts by my good friend Sam Stokes who works with higher education in California.

• Learning how to Develop Windows 7 Applications using VC++
• Free Mathematics Add-in for Word (including the “free” Word) and One Note
• Windows Phone 7- Videos on how to build Silverlight games on Windows Phone 7
• Silverlight 5 Games- Looking around at the early bloggers

 

 

Teaching Students To Create Their Own Business

One of the things that I tell students when I do career talks is that it has never been easier to start a software business than it is today. Many great companies have been started in hard economic times (Microsoft for example) and many have been started by people who were students at the time. Dell may be one of the more well known examples of that even though it is more hardware related. But new markets in games (for hand held devices like phones for example), cloud computing for fast, easy and scalable computer resources as well as easy availability of software bring a new round of low cost of entry. Technical skills are not all that you need though. The making of a company requires some entrepreneurship. While entrepreneurship is in large part an attitude and a confidence we don’t often teach the other skills that support the attitude and build the confidence students need. That’s why I really enjoyed a blog post in the TeachTec blog today. This is one you really want to read!

The article titled Can you develop the next Gates or Zuckerberg in high school? Combining computer science and entrepreneurship talks about a program that Doug Bergman has created in his school in South Carolina. The project is called Entrepreneurship through Xbox Game & Simulation Development .and I’ve included a blurb from a recent announcement of the 2011 U.S. Innovative Education Forum - Round One - Finalists Announced!

Doug Bergman, Porter-Gaud School (Charleston, SC)
Project: Entrepreneurship through Xbox Game & Simulation Development
Students in this hybrid computer science & entrepreneurship class learn how to manage and work on a single large computer programming project as well as develop their own software coding and problem-solving skills. They apply the equally important skills around entrepreneurism using the NFTE (Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship) curriculum, building and eventually presenting an actual business plan for the game idea they choose. Additionally students consider an area in their life (i.e., a subject they are passionate about, an extra-curricular area, or an idea that helps makes the world a better place) and they take that idea and create a game or simulation for the Xbox that teaches, demonstrates, and generates interest in the area they have chosen.

Doug is working cross the curriculum and really taking advantage of student interests to promote learning. He is working closely with his school IT department, Guidance, local colleges and local industry. Guest speakers through the course of the school year help “make it real” for students. It’s great stuff and I encourage you to read the full article.

Doug Bergman came to Microsoft’s attention through the Innovative Education Forum program. There is still a little over a week left to submit applications for the 2011 U.S. Innovative Education Forum. The final deadline to apply is May 15th. I’d love to see more computer science teachers submit and share what they are doing in their classrooms. There is a lot of exciting and truly innovative work going on, not just in computer science of course, and the Innovative Education Forums highlights many of them but we don’t know about them unless teachers tell us about them.

I’ll close with a picture of Doug Bergman and some of his students. Looks like they are having fun!

Most Read Posts–April 2011

I thought it would be interesting to take a look at the top read blog posts from April 2011. I look at both web statistics and RSS statistics.In some ways I feel like the RSS statistics tell me the most about what is useful for my most regular readers. Although I know that several people who seldom if ever miss my posts (I love you all) read via web browsers many follow using RSS readers of some sort. The web hits come from search engines and in links. The search engine traffic is also very informative. It also lets me know that I am covering topics that people are interested in. Hopefully I am helping. The in links most often come when I get a little opinionated. OK I can live with that. So for what ever it is worth here are the top 10 posts according to RSS statistics as provided by Feedburner.

• Boring is Bad Computer science is interesting! And fun. Even world changing exciting! It should be taught that way.
• US Imagine Cup Finals 2011– Up and Running The first of a number of posts I wrote while at the US Imagine Cup finals in Redmond Washing ton. I will be doing more from the world wide Imagine Cup in New York this summer.
• Books for Computer Science Students Just what it seems. I could use more suggestions still.
• Movies for Computer Science Students The second of three posts that make both lists this month. I made my suggestions against an other list from another web site – link to the other site is there
• Cryptography is Hard Yes it is. But it is fascinating and educational as well. One of my favorite things.
• Computer Science Curricula In Flux The new CS Principles course, updated draft curriculum recommendations from CSTA (have you commented on them yet?), and the CS 2013 project (can more people link to http://cs2013.org/ and help us get found more easily?) and more. Things are happening in computer science curriculum. Since this post I attended a two day meeting at the National Science Foundation that discussed what a first (think pre-AP) computer science course should look like in high school. I hope to blog about that soon.
• Be Careful What You Wish For  Some discussion of the recent bump in enrollment of university computer science and what it could mean if high schools had the same bump. Do we have the teaching capacity?
• After The APCS Exam  The AP Computer Science exam is this week. Earlier in April I posted my suggestions for educational things to do with students after the exam to keep them on task and learning.
• The Internet is the Answer for School Reform – Or Is It My opinion pieces, which this is, tend to do better on the web or search engine traffic than among my regular subscribers. This one seems to have struck a chord though.
• XozGaming–High School Team in the US Imagine Cup I love this story of two high school kids who were completely self taught in XNA game programing and who held their own against college students. They took fourth over a great many college and university teams.

And then there are the posts the analytics tool says are the top posts as read by web browsers. Mostly a different list with a couple the same. If you only read via RSS (which is how I read most blogs) you may have skipped by one of these and find it worth taking a second look.

• Interesting Projects-A Collection A post from March that continued to get a lot of web traffic this month. Search engines or links? I’m not sure but I do think it is a useful post if you are looking for interesting and educational programming projects
• Object Oriented Programming Is Dead – This is another post from March that was heavily linked to. The post it was suggested by seemed to get a lot of attention (much more than mine which is good) and a lot of others linked to this one of mine.
• Microsoft Math 4.0 This post from January received a big boost because of a new in link and the fact that Math 4.0 is now available in a bunch more international languages. Your math people will love this one.
• Books for Computer Science Students The first of a few posts that made both lists.
• How Does Kinect Work This post from last November keeps getting a lot of search engine traffic. Hope they all are looking forward to the Kinect SDK (coming soon) as I am.
• Be Careful What You Wish For An other post that made both lists.
• Movies For Computer Science Students Yea! Three posts on both lists.
• Programming Projects Using Arrays I guess a lot of people are searching for this sort of thing. I would have expected more in the fall during ramp up but if people are finding this post useful I’m happy.
• Fizz Buzz A programming Question Yet another project post that continues to get traffic. All the great replies make it valuable in my opinion.
• Credit Card Project Who knew there were that many people looking for information on parsing credit cards!

What was useful (or useless) to you? What topics should I be looking to research and blog more about? How can I be helpful to you this month?

DreamSpark, AppHub and Windows Phone Development

So are your graduating high school seniors bored? or perhaps you are still looking for things to do after the AP CS exam. or maybe you know college or high school students looking to make a few bucks writing code? (Student Develops Games For Windows Phone 7) Edwin Guarin has a new post out called Dreamspark and App Hub Registration process REVEALED! that partners well with my post called Student Access to the AppHub for Windows Phone 7 with information for students who want to create Windows Phone applications and add them to the Windows Marketplace for free. All the information students (18+ I think sorry) need to know to get started is there. Or there and below.

Looking for learning materials? Visit the Windows Phone developer resources pages on App Hub. Here you will find  topic pages so you can learn everything you need to know to create great apps and games for Windows Phone:

• Silverlight for Windows Phone
• XNA Game Studio and XNA Framework
• Windows Phone Developer Tools and Device Unlock
• User Experience and User Interface
• Application and Execution Model
• Input, Touch and Gestures
• Launchers and Choosers
• Security
• Frame and Page Navigation
• Isolated Storage
• Performance
• Advertising Services
• Camera and Photos
• Media – Audio and Video
• Push Notifications and Live Tiles
• App Bar and Controls
• Location and Mapping
• Networking and Web Services
• Sensors
• Globalization and Localization
• Porting Your App or Game to Windows Phone 7
• Application Publishing and Marketplace

BTW if you are a high school teacher and want to make sure your students have access to DreamSpark check out Gautam Reddy’s wonderful blog post that explains the step by step of signing a high school up for DreamSpark

Enter the Student App-a-thon

Bob Familiar (@bobfamiliar) and Lindsay Lindstrom (@LindsayInPhilly) have both been blogging about the Windows Phone Student App-a-thon! For US college students 18 and up.

Be one of the first 1,000 students to publish an App in the Windows Phone Marketplace between April 11^th and June 30th and choose between Halo Reach®, Fable®, or three other games for Xbox 360®. That’s not all. The student who publishes the most Apps will receive $5,000 cash or an equivalent prize package. The three students who publish the 2^nd, 3^rd, and 4^th most Apps will receive $1,000 each.

Computer Science Curricula In Flux

I don’t know when I have ever seen as much going on with computer science curriculum going on at one time. In the K12 space there is an NSF initiative looking at a new pre-APCS course while the College Board, also with NSF support,  is hard at work developing the AP CS Principles course. CSTA is reviewing and looking at updating the ACM K-12 CS Model Curriculum. With all that going on in K12 one might be tempted to think that was enough. But it’s not. There is actually an important curriculum review going on in higher education computer science curriculum.

Specifically the CS 2013 project is going on to review curriculum recommendations for undergraduate computer science curriculum in American (and potentially other) universities. This is an effort undertaken jointly by the ACM and the IEEE Computer Society, the two main computer science professional societies. This effort is still in the early stages but a steering committee has been appointed and is holding regular meetings virtually and face to face. The steering committee made a brief report at the recent SIGCSE conference and more public information will be available over time. The committee has opened a web site (from which I have copied some introductory information below) at http://cs2013.org 

Computing Curriculum: Computer Science 2013 (CS2013) Overview

Following a roughly 10 year cycle, the ACM and IEEE Computer Society jointly sponsor the development of a Computing Curricula volume on Computer Science. These volumes have helped to set international curricular guidelines for undergraduate programs in computing. In the summer of 2010, planning for the next volume in the series, Computer Science 2013 (CS2013), began. The charter for this effort is given below.

Charter

To review the Joint ACM and IEEE/CS Computer Science volume of Computing Curricula 2001 and the accompanying interim review CS 2008, and develop a revised and enhanced version for the year 2013 that will match the latest developments in the discipline and have lasting impact.

The CS2013 task force will seek input from a diverse audience with the goal of broadening participation in computer science. The report will seek to be international in scope and offer curricular and pedagogical guidance applicable to a wide range of institutions. The process of producing the final report will include multiple opportunities for public consultation and scrutiny.

The membership of the committee includes faculty from many universities as well as a few representatives from industry. You can se the whole list at CS2013 Steering Committee. You will probably recognize some names there. If you  get to the very last name on the second column you’ll find Alfred Thompson. Somewhat humbling to be in such august company but I’m doing my best to keep up.