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I love a good discussion. Pros and cons and honest and hopefully friendly discussion of issue with different opinions make for good learning experiences. One of the things I would like to do should I ever get a full-time advanced computer science course is to ask students to study some controversial...

This is the basic instructions for the demo I did as part of the Mobile App Development throwdown at the CS & IT Conference July 10th, 2012, Open Visual Studio (you can get it as part of the Windows Phone SDK ) and create a new project. Be sure to select Visual C# as the language, Silverlight for...

Last night I visited Londonderry (NH) High School to see some of their student’s senior projects. I met a student from this school at the FIRST Robotics Championship earlier this year and was told about his team’s project to create a virtual tour of the school. This school is not far from...

The big news for me yesterday was at Finalists Announced for Round 1 of the Microsoft Partners in Learning 2012 US Forum . I attended this event as a judge last year and learned an incredible amount from these amazing teachers. This first round announced 44 teachers representing 32 projects from across...

Thanks to Johnny Kissko ( 9 Excellent Programming Resources for Kinect ) I recently discovered Ray Chambers who is “currently teaching ICT at Lodge Park Technology College in Corby Northamptonshire.” in England  who has been doing a lot with Kinect. Check out some of his more recent blog posts....

Do beginners even need to learn sorting algorithms? Let’s face it most modern programming environments have a sort function built in. In the so-called real world just about the only people who write sorting algorithms have PhDs in math or computer science and have likely published papers in peer reviewed...

How excited am I about the Partners in Learning Global Forum ? I’m seriously thinking of taking vacation days and paying my own way to Washington DC to see if I can “crash” it. I had a great time and learned a lot judging the US event ( Innovative Education Forum–Judging Day ...

Now I took three semesters of statistics in college. Unfortunately that was 35 years ago and not as much stuck as I would like. Embarrassing but true. So when someone suggests “calculate the odds” I know that there is a right and mathematically sound statistical formula to do it. On the other hand creating...

It seems as though teachers are always looking for new projects to use with students. Projects get stale (at least to a teacher who has been grading lots of them for a long time) or seem to not fit with a current crop of students or just never seem right. So the hunt goes on for more. When I come up...

Not long ago someone posted a query to the AP CS list serve looking for projects that use arrays for them to use in their Visual basic programming course. The response was impressive. I decided to collect them all (with attribution to to people who sent them to the list) because I think it is a useful...

The last several yeas the University of New Hampshire has put on a “Hi Tech” day for area high school students. Between 150 and 200 high school students come to campus to see demonstrations of and to try their hand at some interesting and powerful software. They see tools like Windows Robotics Studio...

I’m a firm believer that programming projects are best when they are about things that are interesting to students. Money tends to interest them so I have long thought about a project involving credit cards. Aren’t credit cards what a lot of students think on when thinking about buying things? I’m known...

Lots of interesting posts by computer science teachers last week. And some news from various sources to share. But let’s start with the teacher blog posts. Kathleen Weaver writes about her experiences with Programming for Windows Phone 7 for teachers and students . Kathleen has a couple of applications...

Projects or exercises that lend themselves to many different “correct” solutions are just about the best sorts of learning experiences I can imagine. They really open the possibilities for discussion and from discussion – questions, answers, explanations – comes real learning...

Kenny Spade is a Microsoft Academic Developer Evangelist out in California who has been writing a series of blog posts that help one learn how to write a Windows Phone game using XNA. There is code, pictures, explanations of what is going on and lots of good information here. It doesn’t seem to...

Happy Valentines Day! Surely there is some appropriate computer project or connection for the day but I can’t think of one off hand. Can you? So for me, here are this weeks interesting links. Oh, before I forget. I have a new format for the blog so if you are reading this via RSS reader jump on...

Recently the Advanced Placement Computer Science mailing list had an exchange looking for ideas/suggestions for games that students could program artificial intelligence routines for. A number of suggestions came out - Connect Four , Abalone , Kalah and 3D Tic Tac Toe for example. There was some discussion...

I hope everyone (US anyway) had a great Thanksgiving last week. For me it was a good time with fun, food and family. We had a great time with my new Kinect sensor with Xbox 360. A great way to work off Thanksgiving dinner. With much of the week off (hooray for a 5 day weekend) I didn’t Tweet a whole...

Graphics can be a lot of fun for students. Well honestly they are fun  for a lot of adults. Recently I read a blog post by Cate Huston ( Experimenting with a Visual, Activity-Based Curriculum ) about some totally visual, graphical project based learning she was working on. Leading off was an image...

I love puzzles and small little programming projects. When you can combine those two at get a project that you can use for a good learning/teaching experience it is just a bit of gold. When the concepts you can get into the project go beyond programming so much the better. And I think I have found one...

I love visualizations. One of my all time favorites are the programs that show how different sorting algorithms work. I was reminded of this by a recent post by Stacey Armstrong ( CS News – What do sorts sounds like? ) with a link to a sorting sample that used sound as well as images. You can access...

I’ll be helping out with some of this workshop at Stevens Institute of Technology in July. Free including accommodations. Plus some stipends. Teaching Real Projects for Real Clients Courses (RPRCCs): A Workshop for Computer Science, Information Technology, and Business Middle and High School Teachers...

In yet another example of how poorly I do at predicting what is going to be interesting and/or controversial almost no one read and absolutely no one commented on my post about companies getting involved in curriculum writing last week ( Curriculum, Companies, Cooperation and Conflict ). My asking of...

I guess I am on a nostalgia kick. Earlier this week I found a link to an Text Ascii Art Generator over on Doug Peterson’s Doug – Off The Record blog . This site lets you enter text and have it reproduced in ASCII art similar to the sample below. There are a large selection of fonts to choose from...

Last week I attended a workshop day at Stevens Institute of Technology where Michael Kolling , University of Kent and creator of Greenfoot was the keynote speaker. Some of the things he said really resonated with me. One of them was that students should be given projects that require a computer. I’ve...