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Computer Science Education (RSS)
Back a year or so ago Microsoft opened the Pre-collegiate faculty connection web portal to share resources for computer science, computer programming, web development and other related teaching areas. It’s been a pretty successful site with tens of thousands
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One of the things I hear pretty regularly is that not everyone needs (or wants) to be a programmer. Some people want or perhaps even need to do some programming or more generally programming like activities but they don’t want to be full time programmers
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Imagine you had a pickup truck that you used for work. One day the person in charge of company vehicles says to you “we’re going to replace your pickup truck with a Prius. We’ll be saving money on gas. Isn’t that great?” You of course reply with something
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One interesting thing that happened to me this past week was that Twitter enabled the list function for my Twitter account (@ AlfredTwo ) Lists are a way to create lists or groups of the people you follow on Twitter. One can open up your lists ( or public
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One of the most useful learning experiences I have had was working with editors. These talented people read my prose and make corrections, suggestions, edits, deletions and make some very helpful comments. Over time this has improved my writing quite
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Small Basic is a great little project out of Microsoft’s DevLab that I have been following for a while. It’s a simple, little Basic language and IDE that harkens back to things like Qbasic and GBBasic and other early versions of BASIC that many of us
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Have you seen the announcement about Computer Science Education week yet? Congress has passed a resolution designating the week of December 7 as Computer Science Education Week. This week was selected because it covers the time of Grace Hopper’s birth
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One of the things I like to demo and to have people do as sort of a “Hello World” for XNA Game Studio is create a simple Pong game. I did this demo today (well technically I will do it this afternoon) and thought I should make the materials more easily
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OK, this may not be the definitive index to Microsoft resources for teachers but it’s close. Something for everyone from elementary school English teachers to high school science teachers (check out the world wide telescope) to high school computer science
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I’m looking for some feedback. I’ve been working on the idea of creating and sharing some computer science related curriculum units. Some might be fairly comprehensive and some, well, let’s call them supplemental resources. The idea is to provide some
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One of the things I hear a lot is that teaching game programming is just i gimmick – something to get kids interested but not a serious course leading to serious things. It occurred to me the other day that people don’t have the same reaction to video
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Today is World Teacher’s Day . On behalf on myself, thanks for all you teachers do every day. I hope your students, their parents and especially your administration appreciates you. And now a few links that I hope you will find useful and interesting
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One of the problems with knowing something about programming, computers and user interface design is that when you run into a poor design in the real world it really makes you wonder. I get this every time I use an ATM. Some of the commands require you
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One of the things I have heard from students over the years is that the data they are asked to process is not relevant or is of so little consequence that they don’t see the point in writing a program to process it. And of course how difficult is it to
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This started out as a comment on Mark Guzdial’s blog post What changes CS Education? which you of course must read. No really. I’ll even wait. Back? OK a key summary jumped out at me: My first pass analysis suggests that, to make change in CS, invent
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