Announcing Small Basic From Microsoft DevLabs

Do you remember the old days of learning how to program with a simple, easy to use, uncomplicated version of BASIC? A lot of people including a lot of teachers (and more than a few professional developers) do. But in general companies are working on more and more powerful version with added complexity. Here now is step sideways. Not all the way batch to the command line but not so far forward that it takes a trained professional to use Small Basic is a new development tool for beginners. For over a year Small Basic was a part-time project by a software developer at Microsoft. He had a small number of people who experimented with it, tried it with their kids, and provided feedback. Today Microsoft released it into “the wild” as part of the new DevLabs portal. (Nice video there with Microsoft engineers talking about innovation and inspiration.

A little more information from the Small Basic portal site:

Small Basic is a project that's aimed at bringing "fun" back to programming. By providing a small and easy to learn programming language in a friendly and inviting development environment, Small Basic makes programming a breeze. Ideal for kids and adults alike, Small Basic helps beginners take the first step into the wonderful world of programming.

• Small Basic derives its inspiration from the original BASIC programming language, and is based on the Microsoft .Net platform. It is really small with just 15 keywords and uses minimal concepts to keep the barrier to entry as low as possible.
• The Small Basic development environment is simple, yet provides powerful modern environment features like Intellisense™ and instant context sensitive help.
• Small Basic allows third-party libraries to be plugged in with ease, making it possible for the community to extend the experience in fun and interesting ways.

You will find a getting started guide at the Small Basic Portal BTW. Check it out and send me you feedback or discuss it in the Small Basic forums or the Small Basic Blog hosted my the developer behind it.

Cross posted from my main high school computer science teacher blog which is updated more regularly.

Tech Talk Tuesday For Teachers

I got a lot of “T” words in that title. What I found this week was a whole calendar of videos and presentations created by the “Microsoft in Education” team that are aimed at teachers, Tech Coordinators, and others involved in using computer technology in schools. Some of the talks are under the “Teacher Tech Tuesday” banner and are aimed specifically for teachers. Some of the talks are yet to come and can be joined live when they are being presented. Others have already happened but can be viewed on demand. A few of the upcoming talks are listed below (borrowed from Mike Tholfsen‘s blog which is worth you checking out as well.)

Here is the schedule for upcoming Teacher Tech events

• Live Oct 27 10:30AM-11:30AM Pacific Time
  Overview of Microsoft Expression Studio 2
  Microsoft Expression Studio takes your creative possibilities to a new level. The... (learn more)

• Live Oct 28 1:00PM-2:00PM Pacific Time
  Teacher Tech Tuesdays - Live Service Solutions for K12 (S+S)
  Create a collaborative academic community that extends beyond classroom walls. Enhance the... (learn more)

• Live Nov 3 1:00PM-2:00PM Pacific Time
  21st Century Leadership
  What are the key characteristics of an effective, technology-rich leadership development program... (learn more)

• Live Nov 11 1:00PM-2:00PM Pacific Time
  Teacher Tech Tuesdays - Microsoft Office OneNote 2007 Toolkit for Teachers
  The perfect resource to help teachers get more organized. The toolkit is... (learn more)

• Live Nov 18 1:00PM-2:00PM Pacific Time
  Teacher Tech Tuesdays - Building/Creating/Leveraging Communities — Blogging & Web 2.0 fundamentals
  Learn how to safely support & encourage new media in your organization... (learn more)

• Live Dec 2 11:00AM-12:30PM Pacific Time
  Tech Talk Tuesdays: MSDNAA/IT Academy
  Microsoft presents the MSDN Academic Alliance (MSDN AA) Program. MSDN AA is... (learn more)

• Live Dec 2 1:00PM-2:00PM Pacific Time
  Teacher Tech Tuesdays - Creating effective communications with OneNote & Outlook

  Learn how Microsoft tools can help you stay in touch with students... (learn more)

• Live Dec 9 11:00AM-12:30PM Pacific Time
  Tech Talk Tuesdays: Introduction to the 2007 Microsoft Office System
  The 2007 Microsoft Office System is a complete set of desktop and... (learn more)

• Live Dec 9 1:00PM-2:00PM Pacific Time
  Teacher Tech Tuesdays - Everyone can be an astronaut with World Wide Telescope
  Take your class on a journey with the World Wide Telescope (WWT)... (learn more)

• Live Dec 16 1:00PM-2:00PM Pacific Time
  Teacher Tech Tuesdays - Introduction to Photosynth
  Imagine being able to share the places and things you love using... (learn more)

Friday Links 101008

I have a small backlog of interesting links so I decided to group some of them in this post. Some are different from what I usually post and some are more typical. But I think they are all interesting to someone who is likely to be reading this blog. I hope so anyway.

I don’t usually link directly to a comment on another blog but this is an exceptional comment. Alan Kay replied to a post by Mark Guzdial recently. In it he compared computer science and programming to Jazz and creating music. A remarkable thought provoking post to say the least. My reply to Mark’s series of posts is boring and unenlightened by comparison. There are some good comments on Mark’s first post on the subject as well.

BTW Robb Cutler weighs in with the whole “Computer Science Without Programming?” question on the CSTA blog. Well worth a read. That makes four CS blogs weighing in on the subject. If you know of more leave me a comment, send me an email or Twitter me at http://twitter.com/alfredtwo

Web hosting is a question I actually get asked about from time to time. A surprising number of students and even teachers what to know about hosting their own websites independent of their school (or others their business. Clint Rutkas has a post about what is involved in a post called “Web Hosting, what to do and where to get it” He wrote this in response to a student who asked him the question. From now on I am just going to point people to Clint’s blog.

I found this article in ComputerWorld that postulates that the current economic crisis may help drive more students into computer science and information technology. Why? Well because finance and investment banking doesn’t look so good as a way to get rich anymore. Interesting idea. The article circulated about the team I work with and Randy Guthrie lays out some of his thinking in a post titled “Financial Crisis May Be Boost for Computer Science/IT Education” Something to discuss in your class or Personal Learning Network (PLN a term I learned from twitter.)

Speaking of Twitter, also on Twitter I found a nice video called “Adding binary numbers explained in 2 minutes” that is just what you’d expect. A two-minute video demo on how to add binary numbers. Sure you can do it yourself in class but you could also link to this as a resource students can access for review or watch a couple of times until they get it down pat.

Beginner Developer Learning Center

One of the questions I get all the time is “I have a student/child/nephew/daughter/etc who wants to learn programming on their own. Where should they go?” My answer is always the Beginner Developer Learning Center and from there to the Kid’s Corner. I may also recommend Popfly as a starting place because it is so much fun. But if they are interested in more than mashups and games, which many of them are, the Kid’s Corner is the place to start. Well this week the Kid’s Corner went though a complete re-design and re-launch and it is better than ever.

The same great resources that were there before are still there but there are some great new ones as well. One of them that I particularly love is a new video on classes and objects. This video is 10 minutes long and features a bunch of kids explaining objects, classes, inheritance, and more using themselves and cardboard boxes as examples. The language is suitable for students as young as middle school without losing the important parts of the concepts. It may be the best 10 minute explanation of objects and classes I have ever seen.

There is also a seven minute explanation of what the Internet is and how it works. This is also suitable for younger students. I can see it being used by a lot of computer literacy classes. I’m sending a link to it to my 83 year old father too.

Everything at the new version of the site is rated Beginner, Intermediate or Advanced to help people select where they should start. So for home schoolers, after school programs, individuals who want to learn on their own or even teachers looking for supplemental resources this is a great place to start. Of course teachers will also want to make sure they check out the resources at the Pre-Collegiate Faculty Connection site as well.

Microsoft Campus Tour Video

I’ve been taking a short blogging break this week. Frankly I’m just flat out with other work lately. Yesterday was meetings and preparation for a talk I gave today at Nashua Community College. I had a great time there because both before and after the talk I had a chance to talk to students in a casual environment. And well yes there was pizza too. One of the questions that often comes up when I talk to students, and a lot of adults as well, is what is it like to work at Microsoft? My work situation is a little less common than most but not as unusual as you might expect. Microsoft has a lot of people who work remotely where remote means from their own homes.

But most Microsoft people work in more traditional offices. These offices are literally all over the world and Microsoft has offices in a lot more places in the US than most people think. But the largest share of Microsoft employees work in the Seattle Washington area. Calling some of those buildings traditional may actually be a bit of a stretch though. Recently the Amazing Max (Agent 008) filmed a video tour of various buildings and campuses that Microsoft has in the Seattle area. Sure it is a recruiting sort of video but it really gives a view into what the Microsoft campus is like. I’ve been to most of the buildings Max tours and what he shows is how it is.

Check it out. I found it interesting, entertaining and informative. If you want to know what office conditions are like at Microsoft look here.

Fun With Colors

I’m in the middle of a deep review of some curriculum for developing web pages. (This curriculum was talked about in a previous post.) It’s really good stuff and I think a lot of teachers will find it valuable. During the course of this review I came upon the discussion of colors and how they are represented in web pages. Colors are defined using a mix of red, green and blue specified as a hexadecimal number. These values go from 0 to ff (or 0 to 255 for you decimal people.)

There are lots of tools on the web and elsewhere that let people pick colors and then supply the hex value they need of course. If you work with web pages on a regular basis you probably even have a favorite. But as a programming geek I decided it would be fun to write my own. Yes, there are people for whom writing a little code while everyone else is watching TV is our idea of fun and relaxing. So I came up with this:

I like sliders. :-) The user moves the sliders to get the color they want (the code sets the background of a picture box in this case) and the hex value is placed in a text box. I used a text box because it is easy to do a copy and paste from text boxes. The key code looks like:

ColorBox.BackColor =  Color.FromArgb( iRed,iGreen,iBlue);
txtHex.Text = iRed.ToString("X2")  + iGreen.ToString("X2")  + iBlue.ToString("X2");

Yes, that is in C# just to remind Clint that I do use it now and again. Interestingly enough when I made my Visual Basic .NET version I was able to copy/paste much of the code from the C# into the VB. Or course I had to delete all those semi-colons afterwards. In any case it is very nice that the ToString method lets the programmer request that integers be displayed as hexadecimal values. I was toying with the idea of writing a function to do that but a) I like the idea of using built in facilities and b) that is something I might leave for students in an assignment just because I am evil. :-)

A little side trick that shows the amazing coolness of Visual Studio and .NET, I opened up two copies of Visual Studio with the C# project in one of them. In the second I created a new Visual Basic Windows application project. Then I did a copy of all the objects on the form in the C# project and pasted them into the form of the VB project. Then I just added code. Again some copy paste, removed the semi-colons but with different syntax and stuff for specifying form level variables and functions/sub routines. I also did not have to explicitly initialize the form level variables because Visual Basic does that on its own. I’ll probably do it to make the program more self documenting though. That’s just good practice.

Hum, I wonder if I should set the color of the words above the slider based only on the value of that particular slider? Not sure how that would look. Left as an exercise for the reader perhaps?

Now These I Get

This is the basic digital lifestyle sort of video. I’ve seen it a number of times and am surprised Microsoft doesn’t make more of it.

This one is a fun look at business and the new Microsoft Office.

Online Programming Contest for Canadian Students

The DWITE programming competition for Canadian high school students is ramping up again for the year.

From their About page:

The primary purpose of the DWITE Online Computer Programming Contest is to provide an avenue for Canadian secondary school students to practice for more recognized programming contests like CCC and ECOO.

This is a series of five online events over the course of the school year. One of the great things about it from my point of view is that they allow a wide variety of programming languages. C, C++, Java, both Visual Basic 6 and Visual Basic .NET, PASCAL and even more. Yes, Turing (used a lot more in Canada than in the US) is on the list as well. So if you are in Canada and are a high school student, teach high school students or know high school students you may want to know more about this. Check out their web site here.

Crossposted from my main high school computer science blog.

Latest Bill and Jerry Video

It’s about 4.5 minutes long and you can see it here. I think its kind of funny. More on the what’s this all about here.

Alfred Thompson The Microsoft Education Blogger

Microsoft Institute

Here is something more for the administration side of the education business.

Microsoft Institute Overview

Participate in a unique professional development experience that will provide you and your organization with tools and resources to create and support innovative environments and organizations. Based on key learnings of Microsoft initiatives and our Partners in Learning program, (which has already reached nearly 3.5 million educators in more than 100 countries), this program will give you new ideas to implement in your organizations, district, classroom, or workplace.

You’ll have ample opportunity to participate in, investigate, and debate different theories and practices that can lead to improved learning environments and more effective organizations. We limit each three-day session to 40 or fewer participants to ensure an environment in which everyone can contribute, offer unique perspectives and learn from one another.

Guests are strongly encouraged to attend the full three-day experience. Each day builds on the knowledge gained the previous day. Multi-functional teams from organizations ready to create change are the preferred audience. There is no registration fee to attend a Microsoft Institute.

What you’ll learn

The Microsoft Institute will expose you to new tools and educational resources that have been developed through the Partners in Learning projects as well as our experience in education, government, and innovation. You’ll learn about the vision for the School of the Future and the process that went into creating it. You’ll learn how to use the Education Competency Wheel—the professional development and hiring tool used at the school—in your organization. You will be exposed to new technologies and learn how to implement them. You will get glimpses into how we run our business and think about managing innovation.

Who should attend

Organizations are encouraged to send multi-functional teams—visionaries and implementers, teachers, school leaders, administrators, superintendents, city officials, and school board members, and technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Yes, it is free to attend. You do have to pay your own transportation and accommodations but if you are near upcoming locations like Tampa, FL or Washington DC you may very well want to check this out. A sample agenda is here.

Foundations Of Digital Games Conference

The Game Development in Computer Science Education conference has been renamed and this year’s event is called the Fourth International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games. This is the premier educational conference for faculty who use game development to teach computer science concepts and principles. In the past we have had a small number of high school computer science faculty come on the conference but I am hoping that by giving people early warning we can get more this time. A lot of the work being done for early university computer science scales to high school as well. Frankly I am also hoping that some of the pioneering high school faculty out there will submit papers (and hopefully get them accepted) and be able to present as well. My observation is that some high schools are really getting a lot of value out of game development courses and people can really learn from those experiences.

Conference dates:

April 26-30, 2009

Conference location:

Disney Wonder cruise ship, departing from Port Canaveral, Florida, USA

About:

FDG '09, the International Conference on Foundations of Digital Games is a focal point for academic efforts in all areas of research involving computer and console games, game technologies, game play and game design. Previously known as the Conference on Game Development and Computer Science Education, this year's conference takes on a new scope covering the breadth of game research and education. The conference is targeted at researchers making contributions that promote new game capabilities, designs, applications and modes of play.

The call for papers can be found on the web site for the conference at www.FoundationsOfDigitalGames.org The web site is still building out and more information will be coming over the next few weeks and months. I’ll post much of it here as well.

Oh and yes the conference is on a cruise ship but it is as serious and professional a conference as you can imagine. The venue (especially with very limited cell phone and Internet coverage) promotes an awful lot of serious, valuable and educational conversations. The networking potential (of the human kind) is in my opinion unparalleled. Some of the top computer science faculty in the world present at this conference. There is also good attendance and technical presentations by people in the main stream of the game industry. This is an amazing learning opportunity.

Interesting Links – 15 July 2008

I am struggling to  catch up from my vacation. One of the trailing points in my activity is blogging – both reading and writing. I’ve got over 500 blog posts (mostly in the education category – aren’t you all on vacation?) to read. But I’ve come up with a few things already that are worth giving some attention to.

The $40 Billion Gorilla – Ben Chun had an interesting post complete with slide show on his talk titled “Bringing a $40 Billion Gorilla Into Your Classroom: Using Video Games to Teach Computer Science” with some links to some free resources he uses. $40 billion is the projected value of the video game development industry.

Learning Before Learning – A Canadian university student, Aziz, takes on the controversy about students learning things on their own before they are taught them in class in a post called “Learning Before Learning (or getting ahead of school curriculum)”. I have to think about this one still

Imagine Cup Advice – This year’s Imagine Cup recently finished up and involved students from around 100 countries this year. Two university faculty whom I respect greatly have posts about what it takes to make a successful team for a competition like this. Didith Rodrigo from Ateneo de Manila (Philippines) wrote her comments at a post called Moving forward from the Imagine Cup While Rob Miles from the university of Hull (UK) wrote a post called How to Make a Great Imagine Cup Entry A lot of their advice works for any important project (or start up business plan) that has to be presented to an important audience. Well worth the short reads.

Interesting Things Among My Team – I work with an interesting group of people just about any way you define “interesting.” A couple of them are up to special things these days. Clint Rutkas is getting very close to getting his self stabilizing skate board working. He’s got a video of him testing it on his blog here. Clint writes about some of his remaining issues here. I love that he admits in advance that his father is going to say “I told you so.”

The connection between music and math is fairly well known but there seems to be a connection between music and computer science as well. (I don’t just mean things like Dan Waters’ creation of Guitar Matey for the Xbox 360 using XNA either) DeVaris Brown who is a full time high tech member of the Microsoft team is also a professional DJ under the name DJ Fury. So when the Imagine Cup team needed a DJ for a major party in Paris they brought DeVaris along. The interview is here and you may find it very interesting just how computer technology fits into his DJ practice. He uses technologies like SilverLight and Popfly to bring his shows to the Internet. I wish I was a talented and as musical as DeVaris but I’ll probably have to stick with just being better looking. (I added that to see if DeVaris reads my blog. :-) )

Well I have a lot more catching up to do. More interesting stuff to blog about soon.

[Note: cross posted from http://blogs.msdn.com/alfredth/archive/2008/07/15/interesting-links-15-july-2008.aspx to give my friends some extra link love.]

Imagine Cup – Student Environment & Technology Competition

The 2008 Imagine Cup finals is currently being held in Paris France. This international competition involves tens of thousands of university students around the world. This year’s theme is "Imagine a world where technology enables a sustainable environment." The creative projects that teams have come up with are downright amazing. I think that these teams are demonstrating ways that computer science and technology can make a real difference in the world. Exciting stuff.

The official Imagine Cup finals blog is open and active. There you will find regular updates from the staff at the finals event (no I didn’t get to go – maybe one day) as well as links to blogs by many of the competitors. The team is adding all sorts of information including team profiles, interviews, pictures and much more! There are also video updates at Channel 8 BTW.

There are team blogs from all over the world. The list alone is worth checking out to see not only who is their from your country or geographic region but from other parts of the world as well. (The US Software Design team blog is here.)

Also several friends of mine at there and blogging. Didith Rodrigo is a professor of Computer Science at Ateneo De Manila in the Philippines. I never miss an update at her blog and will be following her stay in Paris with interest. And Rob Miles who is a lecturer at the University of Hull in the UK is there. Rob is always interesting. Both have posted their first messages from the Imagine Cup finals.

Technorati Tags: Imagine Cup,IC2008,IC08

Above & Beyond Awards - Massachusetts

The Mass Technology Leadership Council is a great organization of people and companies in the high technology industry in Massachusetts. One of their big interests in supporting teachers who are using innovation in teaching in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math. Last fall I was happy to write about the 2007 winners to highlight both what teachers are doing and that someone is giving them a little attention for a change. Time is running out to nominate teachers for this year’s awards. There is cash money involved so if you know of a teacher who is doing innovative things in STEM education please nominate them. The deadline is June 30th so do it now.

Above & Beyond Awards - 2008 Application

Outstanding contributions in education too often go unnoticed. That is why the Education Foundation of the Mass Technology Leadership Council created the Above and Beyond Awards in 1996. The unique program acknowledges and rewards the unsung heroes who are encouraging the innovative teaching and learning of Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (grades K-12) in Massachusetts schools.

Up to 10 Awards will be presented in the fall of 2008.  Individual nominees are eligible for a $1,000 grant, teams of teachers are eligible for a $2500 grant.

Link to online application: http://www.masstechleaders.org/wor/edfoundation/AboveApplication.aspx

Nominations are due June 30, 2008.

Please contact Heather Johnson, Executive Director, MassTLC Education Foundation, heather@masstlc.org , if you would like more information.

Friday Interesting Links

Every so often I run into a number of things that I think are interesting and useful but that I don’t feel like I have enough added value to write a whole blog post about each one. This is one such week. I hope you will find at least one of these links interesting and useful.

CeeBots – from their web page (which is available in English, French and German):

CeeBot is a brand new concept that will introduce you to programming while having fun. The programming language you'll use is very similar to those used by professional programmers to develop their products. CeeBot introduces many modern concepts found in today's most popular environments like C++, C# or Java.
After teaching you the syntax of CeeBot, progressive exercises will lead you to use important concepts such as variables, loops, conditional branching, functions, classes, objects, etc.

OurCourts – This is a new project  that will eventually include an educational game about the US Court system Retired Associate Justice Sandra Day O'Connor is involved in this project. Right now it holds a lot of useful links and information but there should be more still by the fall.

Randy Guthrie interviews a student who will be an intern at Microsoft this summer. I hope he does a follow up after the summer. Randy also has a lot of resources for students here.

Chris Stephenson of the CSTA blogs about the recent meetings that CSTA ran to discuss K-12 computer science outreach with a number of universities and colleges. She discusses the various levels of support that universities are (or in some cases are not) putting into this effort.

On a related topic there is information about Microsoft Tech Trends events here. Tech Trends events are one way that Microsoft is working with colleges, universities and in some cases high schools to create and run events to get students interested in the CS and IT fields of work and study.

Kenny Spade Joins the Academic Team at Microsoft

Kenny Spade is the new ADE covering northern California. His blog is at twitchgamer.com

May Posts in Review

May was an interesting month for me in several ways. One area that I struggled with though was blogging. Perhaps it is because the school year is winding down but I could not seem to stay on a roll. Still there were a couple of posts that received a lot of traffic. XNA was big because of the Zune announcement. And people seemed to be interested in projects for use in their classrooms. I have a long post about a good sized group project that I want to propose. It will be coming later this week if I finish writing it. The top discussion item was on code optimization.

Speaking of the Zune and XNA connection that post was here. In a bit of irony a lot of the traffic seemed to come from the trackback to the XNA blog announcement where there is really more original information. Though to be fair to myself I did link to other sources of information.  Speaking of more links, information about an online tutorial for Zune/XNA is here.

In the area of computer science programming project ideas I had one post (here) that linked to a number of good projects by someone else. But I also had a complete description of a code breaking program that got a lot of traffic. Lots of that came from search engines but even more of it game from Dzone. My thanks to the person who listed it and the others who voted for it. I need to figure out how to add Dzone links to my blog like the Digg one I have a Windows Live Writer plug-in for. More project ideas are coming. In fact my goal for the summer is to develop a bunch of new programming project ideas.

I had a number of useful things for people using Microsoft Office as well.  Here and here I talked about tools that make it easier to find things on the new Office 2007 ribbon interfaces. If you are teaching (or just using) Office 2007 those are tools you’ll want to check out.

Other cool things that I talked about in May included:

• Worldwide Telescope (post)
• Popfly Game Creator (post)
• Online Analog Clock (post)

June is now off to a running start. Yesterday marked five years I have been working at Microsoft. The time has flown as I continue to have a good time working with great people – inside and outside of Microsoft. The best is yet to come I think.

[Note that this is crossposted from my primary blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/alfredth ]

An Analog Computer Clock

Every so often I like to highlight some technology that is just plain cool. The clock below is one such.

Michael Scherotter created this watch image using a very high end, very sharp looking watch with permission of the manufacturer. While I typically do not wear a watch I do have an appreciation for them. Digital watches are just plain boring while high end watches like the Ball are as much works of art as they are examples of fine engineering. So taking the looks of the watch and replacing the “works” behind it with a computer code is interesting. It may not be as portable or even as accurate (computer clocks are notoriously inaccurate) but it is a really cool clock for a computer desktop.

Michael has written a blog post about how he created this application that makes interesting reading. The purpose of this project was largely to show what can be done with Silverlight. I think we’ll be seeing a lot more cool Silverlight applications as the newer versions are released.

Who Cares How Fast the Code Is?

Ironically one of the problems teachers can have with teaching about optimizing programs is that computers are a) so fast now and b) getting faster all the time. Students often do not see the need to create more efficient algorithms because they assume that what they have is fast enough and if it isn’t then the next computer they buy will “fix” the problem by being faster. And truth be told with most of the toy programs we are forced to use in a classroom situation (not enough time for really large complicated projects) things do work out that way. But real life is more complicated then that. So we really owe it to students to discuss code optimization (and refactoring which is closely related.)

I’ve had a couple of conversations with students over the years that basically took the form of “yeah it is slow but it works and I’ll never need to run it again.” There is some logic to that of course. I once had a program that I ran maybe once a week. I had thrown it together in a hurry to meet an immediate need. Once I realized I would need it more often I also realized that it was very inefficient. I saw several ways that it could be a lot faster. But I did some math. It took about a minute too long (it could possibly run in seconds) and it would take me at least an hour to re-write it. Was I going to run it 60 times? Probably not so where was the payback for my time? I did get a new computer shortly there after which was fast enough that the run time was cut in half so now the payback time was 120 more runs – so it would really cost me more time to fix then it would save me. That sort of math takes place more than many would think by the way. But sometimes it comes out very differently.

Sometimes the issue is around applications that really need to be fast. Other times it is around hardware that has some limitations that have to be taken into account because changing the hardware is not an option. Cy Khormaee recently talked to Paul Oliver of Legendary Studios to come up with a list of optimizations that should be taken into account when creating games for the Zune device. The Zune was designed as a music player not a game device. Since XNA Game Studio 3.0 (now available in preview) lets programmers create games for the Zune this creates an interesting learning opportunity. Specifically the hardware limitations have to be taken into account if one wants to create a game that performs well enough for people to really enjoy. This is an opportunity to have a real “teachable moment.” The list Paul and Cy have makes for a good read and the start of some interesting discussions.

Also on performance, Dare Obasanjo, who deals with some very large data intensive social networking applications, took a look at some scaling problems with Twitter recently on his blog. He examines how basic design choices can make the difference between an application that really works and one that collapses under the weight of input/output needs. This is a discussion worth reading about as students consider that many of the most important applications revolve around how data is saved and retrieved.

Microsoft Education Team Blogs

The Microsoft Education US Specialist Team just started there own blog. This is the technical team that supports Microsoft’s pre-sales efforts to education. The blog itself should be interesting and there are a couple of introductory posts there already. One of the other useful things they have is one of the most complete lists of education related blogs by Microsoft people I have ever seen. It’s a world wide bunch with a number in the United Kingdom and at least one in Australia. There list is below.

 

It's all about edU

Off Campus

UC in Education blog

Higher Education Tech NE

Higher Education Tech Mid-Atlantic

Kevinsul's Mgmt Blog

Cool stuff and happenings for HiEd

HiED West Region News

Application Platform and Development Tools

A Work-Life Balance

Computer Science Teacher

Dan on eScience & Technical Computing @ Microsoft

MSOZACADEMIC

Academic Care Blog

Microsoft Belfast - School Technology Innovation Centre (STIC)

UK Live@edu Blog

The UK Higher Education Blog

Microsoft UK Schools News Blog

The UK Further Education Blog

UK Academic Team Blog

OneNote and Education

Higher !nnovation