Additional profile information on Alfred Thompson at Google+
A lot of people are looking into using Python in computer science education these days. Of course a lot of people are also using Visual Studio for Visual Basic or C# or even F# and it would be nice to use the same IDE for Python as well. The learning curve for an IDE is not something that really adds value to learning a new programming language. So I thought I would share the following from a recent announcement of the release to manufacturing of version 1.0 of the Python Tools for Visual Studio software.
Here are a couple of videos on Python Tools for Visual Studio (more on YouTube):
Interested in programming competitions for your students but travel is not in the budget? You may want to look into the ACSL contests. This announcement came via by the CSTA member listserv.
The American Computer Science League opens registration for this year's contest September 1st.
ACSL is An international computer science competition for grades 6-12 that is way more than just programming!!!
ACSL gives your school the opportunity to:
There are four contests that are administered at each school monthly. Scores are cumulative. There are four divisions to choose from based upon student ability. Each contest consists of two parts:
Mention that you are a CSTA member and get a free Contest CD ($20) upon joining. You are a CSTA member aren’t you? Join for free at http://csta.acm.org/
ACSL is also on approved activities list of the National Association of Secondary School Principals.
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