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Happy Labor Day! Well here in the US anyway. Technically a public/work holiday and I do plan to spend most of it relaxing. Unless my wife has other plans that is. I spent yesterday doing some early fall yard work for example. But it looks good so it was worth it. I have spent some time collecting some...

Happy Monday! Are you back to school yet? A lot of teachers are. If you are back I hope it is going well. If not yet, are you working out to get into “teaching shape?” The Principal’s Page had a post about that last week - Teacher Tired. Well in my attempt to be useful here is my weekly round up of interesting...

There seem to be a growing number of visual programming languages available these days. Kodu (below) is for creating games by younger people. It’s “When"/Do” model is simple and easy to learn. It’s a bit limited though. It is really a domain specific language for games. Scratch is also a visual...

I tried to take most of last week off. Well I guess I actually did officially take most of the week off but somehow I spent more time than I should have on email and Twitter. Perhaps I have a problem. :-) But I didn’t really blog and I avoided most real work. I even made it to the beach for a while...

You have to love the Internet and especially twitter. You can hear about things that you’d never hear about from the main stream media. For example, from Andrew Parsons (@ MrAndyPuppy ) I learned that there is an official Geek/Nerd Pride Day - May 25: Geek/Nerd day Information and Geek/Nerd Day Facebook...

I recently came across a blog post titled “ Are Storytellers The Best Programmers ” and it got me thinking. A lot of beginning programming courses use tools like Alice , Scratch or Kodu which are programming tools but which also allow and even encourage creating stories. (NCWIT has a nice case study...

I blogged a lot of opinion pieces last week. I’ll try to have more information this week. But at the very least I have a few good links to share today. One of the best may be Teaching Kids Programming – Teaching Girls to code in Danish which is a trip report by Lynn Langit who recently took her 2 day...

No, really! Are you making your summer plans yet and do they include learning time? I have some ideas for you. First off is CS & IT run by CSTA. This is in my opinion the single best day of professional development of the year for computer science teachers. Great sessions. Great networking. Lots...

When it rains it pours! I spent last week at FETC in Florida but kept a weather eye out for interesting things to pass on via Twitter (follow me on Twitter @ AlfredTwo ) and this blog. There sure was a lot going on. This is a larger post that usual which I guess is a good thing. Read though and I’m sure...

This will probably be my last interesting links post for the year. I’m taking some vacation time and hope to take a break even from the Internet. Hopefully you all will  be getting some rest and recharge time as you prepare for the new year as well. I’ve got a few posts up and in the queue so if...

Welcome to this week’s collection of interesting links. Some of these I found on Twitter, some on various blogs, and some came by email from various people. I hope you find something useful here. The Innovative Teacher Network is now the new Partners in Learning Network , free public/private communities...

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 a language or tool at a well-known institution. ...

As I put this summary together I’m just about ready to head to Redmond WA by way of Seattle in the morning. Early in the morning. Even earlier than my wife gets up to go to school.  It’s my first trip to  the Microsoft headquarters area in over a year so I am really excited that I’ll be seeing...

The people at the Lifelong Kindergarten Research group at MIT recently unveiled ScratchEd a new community site for educators who are using Scratch . The goals of the site are listed in the introduction: To better support the activities of these educators, I designed ScratchEd - a companion site for Scratch...

It is really great to be back at SIGCSE again this year. I have been coming to SIGCSE for years now. I’m not sure when I started coming but the last five or six years I haven’t missed any. And I have a lot of friends who come most years as well. Some of them I only see at SIGCSE while others I see at...

I keep doing sets of links to hand out at various conferences. It seems like every time I do the list comes out a little differently. Some new things. Some things have new addresses. And the order of things changes for the audience. This list is from a pair of handouts I have put together for a high...

Over at the teaching computers to kids website I found a link to kidslike.info . This site is dedicated to providing free tools for teaching computer science, math and science. They are promising more subjects in the future. I found a number of interesting articles and information about computer programming...

I keep learning cool things from Twitter. No really. The people I follow are often doing interesting and educational things and sharing via Twitter. Last week someone posted a Tweet about http://learnscratch.org/ . I made a note to visit the site and did so this week. It is pretty cool and very helpful...

I spent yesterday at a large STEM event in Denver Colorado. Something like 1,500 middle school girls were brought to the Colorado Convention center for workshops and talks about science, technology and engineering. My colleague Hilary Pike conducted several workshops while I manned the booth we had in...

Yesterday I gave one of the keynote talks at Stevens Institute of Technology’s second annual high school computer science workshop . Ursula Wolz , The College of New Jersey, was a tough act to follow with her great presentation/demo on Scratch . Scratch is one of my favorite teaching tools and I learned...

I would imagine that a lot of people are looking for interesting things to do with brand new computers this week. Some people are (I hope) looking for ways to teach young people about programming. Or perhaps you are looking for your self regardless of your age. Well it seems like this is also a time...

November was an interesting month in some ways. It seems that when I really lay out an opinion piece it attracts more attention in both readers and comments. At the same time some informational posts quietly attract a lot of readers as well. Is Computer Science Dying was the most read and most commented...

Long before I ran into graphical/drag and drop programming languages for kids like Scratch and Alice I was thinking about some thing similar. What I wanted was a tool that allowed a beginner to write their own programs without syntax and syntax errors getting in the way. I wanted something that would...

Mark Hendrickson from O'Reilly has an interesting review of the market for computer books in a four part series. The fourth part examines the programming language book market. I have no doubt that it is a valuable discussion for people who are thinking about what sort of programming language book to...

One of the shining stars of teaching computer science in recent years is the Alice environment. There is some early research and many anecdotal tales of great success using this tool for teaching beginning programming. I must admit that I like it myself. It is friendly and powerful. I especially like...