December, 2007

Sometimes it really pays to have smart friends and let them figure things out for you even if you don't really plan it that way. Early this week a received a brand new robot in the mail. I've been waiting for it for a while. The problem of course is that it came at a bad time. My schedule this week was full. I had some travel and a bunch of meetings that took me out of the office just about every day and filled the time in the office with other things. So the robot stayed in the box. A very sad thing.

Fortunately for me one of my friends and co-workers also received an identical robot this week. Now I don't know if he had more time or if his wife had a shorter list of things to do after work then mine did or if he just goes without sleeping. But long story short Dan had time to setup and experiment with his robot.

But it gets better and this is what is going to make my life easier. Dan Waters has created a series of videos of his initial setup and experience that I think are very well done. I've been watching them to prepare before  I setup and experiment with my own robot. The index for the series (they're all in nice short manageable chunks of time) may be found here. Hopefully I'll have some things to report about my own stuff shortly.

BTW If you haven't already you may want to check out and install Microsoft Robotics Studio and Visual C# Express (both free downloads) for use with Dan's projects.

There is a problem, a technical problem, that I hear about from teachers from time to time. I've passed along a couple of solutions to it by email but it occurred to me that posting the issue and the possible solutions here might make it easier for people to find it. I'd also like to hear from others who are having this problem to find out if these solutions do or do not work for them.

The problem happens most commonly when an InputBox is used in a Visual basic program that is saved on a network drive. The error message says:

System.Resources.MissingManifestResourceException was unhandled
  Message="Could not find any resources appropriate for the specified culture or the neutral culture. 

Make sure "Microsoft.VisualBasic.CompilerServices.VBInputBox.resources" was correctly embedded or linked into assembly "Microsoft.VisualBasic" at compile time, or that all the satellite assemblies required are loadable and fully signed."

One way this problem happens is if the network share where the work is saved is not a "trusted share." This is a safety feature that is designed to protect a computer from malicious software on a remote disk drive. There are steps you can take to indicate that a network share is trusted and can be relied upon. Complete instructions on how to set that up may be found here. I go though the steps with pictures for several versions of Visual Studio there.

In other cases there are some project privileges issues which can be corrected by following these steps:

1. Open the "Project" menu and select the "project properties" option. Select the  "Compile" tab and turn off option explicit and check  the "disable all warnings" box.
2. Under the "Security" tab, select include for "ReflectionPermission" in the permission requirement table. Then close the application.
3. Lastly open the the directory where the project is stored and in the bin/debug subdirectory find and delete the *.vshost file.

You can read about and discuss this problem solution at Microsoft's online support forum here.

I'm really not sure why this later solution works or why it is sometimes necessary and other times not. But for the time being it seems to be solving the problem for a lot of people and that makes it seem worth sharing.

Other resources are this article on MSDN - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/2bc0cxhc.aspx which is about .NET Framework Configuration Tool (Mscorcfg.msc)

And this one that lists some not really supported things that I do not recommend - http://www.emmet-gray.com/Articles/CodeAccessSecurity.htm

Well the nominations for the Educational Blog awards are out again. I'm not nominated but some people I know and blogs I read are. Vicki Davis who writes a great blog called the Cool Cat Teacher blog is nominated for best teacher blog and I'm happy about that.  I hope she wins.

This event got me thinking though about the state of computer science teacher blogs. On one hand one would think that if any teachers were blogging it would be computer science teachers. They are after all on the computer a lot and knowledgeable in all sorts of computer applications. But one truth I have found is that they are all at least as busy as other teachers. Often times they spend so much of their so-called free time (and a lot of not free time) solving technology problems for others that blogging is not often something that fits into their schedule.

All that being said I have a few high school computer science teacher blogs in my blog role and a couple of blogs that I would recommend that computer science teachers read. It thought I would list s few (give them some link love) and give a line or two about each so you can decide if you want to check them out. They are listed in no particular order BTW.

So here now the review.

High School Computer Science Teacher Blogs

• Brian Scarbeau - The typical extra busy teacher Brian does not post a lot but I always find a lot of value in what he does post. Brian is an innovator who has done and written about things he is doing in web development and game development. Brian is also the brain behind Computer Science Education day.
• Tom Indelicato - Tom is an amazing teacher who does a lot of innovative things in his classes. He's done Pocket PC development, game development and runs his school's FIRST Robotics team. Having had the job he now has (I hired him - best hiring I ever did) I understand why he doesn't have time to post as often as I would like.
• Mr. Higgins - Higgy teaches both math and computer science like a lot of people. He's young energetic and always has a lot of new ideas.
• Kathleen Weaver - Kathleen teaches HS CS in Dallas TX. She writes about the joys and no so joys of teaching as well as sharing ideas and links for others to use.
• Ben Chun - Titled "and yet it moves" Ben is another young teacher in his early years of teaching. Young teachers seem to be blogging more than older ones. Imagine that! Some reflections, some project ideas, like others in my list not a lot of posts but well written and interesting.
• Christian Day - Nothing posted since last July. Most posts are links to resources for his students or for teachers taking his summer workshop for AP CS teachers.
• Dustin Swanson - Computer Science 30 - Mostly class assignments and projects for a programming class using PHP and MySQL. Not updated very often.

I have a few others in my RSS reader that have not been updated in a very long time and I think they are pretty much abandoned. My gut tells me there have to be more high school (and perhaps middle school) computer science teachers out there blogging and sharing ideas. If you know of any PLEASE leave me a comment.

Blogs for High School Computer Science Teachers to Read

• CSTA Blog - The official blog of the Computer Science Teachers Association. If you are a high school computer science teacher you should be a member and this is a blog you should read for interesting information, links and to stay current. Contributions are made by members of the CSTA board and their amazing executive director Chris Stephenson.
• Leigh Ann Sudol - In Need Of A Base Case - Leigh Ann is hard to categorize. She is a very experienced high school teacher and a long time reader of the AP CS exam (Leigh Ann trained me the year I graded the AP exam and will forever call me her "acorn") but these days she is a lecturer at Carnegie Mellon University. Yes, she is that smart. She blogs about interesting topics in CS and CS education research.
• Mark Guzdial - If you want to keep up with computer science education research this is the blog to follow. Mark Guzdial is on the faculty of Georgia Tech and the work he does there with CS1/CS2 type courses applies directly to AP CS and even earlier. He hardly ever writes a post that I don't want to link directly to.

I subscribe to a lot of other technology blogs and blogs by professors and I do link to some of them from time to time. But these three above are the ones I would recommend to people with limited blog reading time because of the constant value.