This will be last blog post to this blog, as I am leaving Microsoft effective Monday, October 17.  Post-Microsoft I’ll be contracting (data projects, both production and education) and spending more time growing ‘Teaching Kids Programming’ around the world.  Two years ago someone dear to me...

Ok now that I have your attention (!), I am going to write a bit about my first experience at the international, annual Agile conference.  Agile 2011 was held in Salt Lake City, Utah last week.  I attended and spoke (on ‘Teaching Kids to Program Using Agile Practices’) and had a GREAT time...

I co-hosted the MSDN show ‘This Week in Channel 9’ with Brian Keller – enjoy!

Teaching ADLIBS TKP Tips: Teaching the SmallBasic ADLIBS recipe The parts of the ADLIBS recipe are as follows: 1) Recipe – guided line-by-line translation, to teach core concepts. For ADLIBS, you are building on what the kids learned in all of the previous drawing recipes (core IDE and language concepts...

While at fooCamp this weekend in Sebastopol, among many interesting people, I met the founders of a new site – Lanyrd.com.  They call themselves a ‘social conference directory’ and from my first try-out – I LOVE their services and site. Take a look at the Lanyrd page for the upcoming SoCalCodCamp...

This is generally the second recipe the kids work with (the first one is SQUARE – and there are lots of tips and videos on how we teach programming generally, i.e. using Agile methods and specifically for that first recipe on TKP here .  Please go there FIRST if need be. In this blog post, I’ll...

We discovered a shortcut that makes teaching #TKP courseware with SmallBasic even easier.  You can put everything you need for each pair of students on a single flash drive – SmallBasic, SmallBasic Extensions, Courseware, etc… AND you can run SmallBasic itself directly from this drive.  So...

What have we been up to this year?  Take a look at the slide deck below. This also includes ‘stuff we need’ and future directions.  I welcome your comments Teaching Kids Programming Jan-April 2011 Update View more presentations from Lynn Langit

I got this story on my blog in response to a presentation I did (on .NET Rocks ) about TKP and thought you might enjoy reading it.  Details have been obscured on request. “I heard your Podcast about Teaching Kids to Program and it was really inspiring, especially the new course work you are developing...

The first-ever LEGO Serious Play event at the WiT Mix11 luncheon hosted around 100 attendees, both women and men.  I co-led the event with LEGO superstar, Thomas Mueller (shown below leading a LEGO Mindstorms event at the Microsoft Store in Mission Viejo, CA). Thomas graciously lent us over 8,000...

   AND This weekend we took 8 Local Developer volunteers (most pictured below) from So Cal to Desert Code Camp in Phoenix, Az. We taught 7 hours of hands–on content designed to introduce children (ages 5-17) to programming. This is the TKP’s most extensive effort to date at a CodeCamp. ...

Enjoy this short video of Orange County, CA teacher Lisa Martin talking about her class of high school students at a recent TKP event.

We’ve been making short videos on how to teach the parts of each recipe.  Not all recipes are complete, but we are working on it… Each recipe consists of the following parts and key components (for teachers): *) Setup – teachers should pair students w/5 minute rotations and should use Virtual Proctor...

Llewellyn and I are quite interested in best practices around education in general (as we continue to develop our TKP courseware and teaching methods).  Lately we’ve been struck by several presentations about the use of YouTube for education. The first of which is the recent TED presentation by...

Llewellyn and Bart got together to write the first pass at koans for Rx last night. We published the result on CodePlex today - here . What's a koan? It's an interactive excercise, using the lanaguage (features) and done in the editor to learn without a teacher. Kind of like directed hacking, just...

We are frequently asked, ‘Just what are you guys doing now?’ about our work Teaching Kids Programming.  Enjoy this short video update! Viewing this content requires Silverlight. You can download Silverlight from http://www.silverlight.net/getstarted/silverlight3 .

We taught the first of our new, weekly events at the Microsoft office in Irvine, CA today.  The high school group coded up two SmallBasic recipes.  Here’s a video of how the day went.

I uploaded a deck (with recordings) on ways to engage the developer community to work with local educators to teach kids programming – enjoy! Developers and Educators - Teaching Kids Programming View more presentations from Lynn Langit .

I participated in my first CodeRetreat in PHX recently. I had way more fun than I expected to and it was a safe environment for me to learn new languages. I really liked getting to pair with skilled developers who travelled from as far away as Mexico to attend. WHAT? In a nutshell it's an 8 hour day...

I bought a new laptop with my own money last week – the first time I’d purchased a laptop since I joined Microsoft nearly 4 years ago.  What did I plunk down a little over $ 1500 for?  A MacBook Air . What did I buy? A MacBook Air, 11” with 4 GB RAM and a 128 GB SSD – full spec here . What...

  Finally, a neat way to use Twitter Lists!  I created a ‘newspaper’ from my @llangit\WomenWhoTech list on a new site called ‘ Paper.li’ .  I am really liking the format.  You can also create your own free, customized ‘newspapers’ of groups of people you follow and/or hashtags (such...

When I think of 2010, I think of people who inspire me.  These people are exceptional, they constantly amaze and delight me.  I thought it might be nice to share them with you. SoCalDevGal’s People to Watch from 2010   10 and 9.  Who – Derrick Muneene and Dr. Mark Shields What...

We are working on our website for TKP ( Teaching Kids Programming ) and YOU can help!  How?  We need to take the content from all the various repositories (YouTube, SlideShare, CodePlex, our own heads, etc…) and get it into a USABLE format. We are looking for help evaluating how we did from...

Yes, I know most ‘normal’ people don’t go to work on their vacation.  But then, I am not usually described as normal.  In this blog post I’ll write about my fourth trip to Africa in as many years. Disclaimer: I forgot my camera!  Thanks to Esther Schorr, Annali Delsink, Albert Zulu and...

I spent last weekend at BarCamp San Diego (hereafter noted as #BCSD7 – it’s Twitter hashtag).  What’s a BarCamp , you ask?  Well, read on… What’s BarCamp? BarCamp is a community-led unConference for geeks.  It usually runs over a weekend.  Registration is required (to calculate space...