Daryll McDade - The High School Guy : MainFunction

Looking for post AP exam activities? Hunt for the Wombat is here!

Daryll McDade — Sat, 08 Apr 2006 00:54:00 GMT

What can teachers and students work on now that the AP exam is over? Hunt for the Wombat is a 4-6 week project designed to give AP Computer Science students the opportunity to apply their programming skills, gain broader awareness and understanding of the software development process and have fun along the way. By participating in a “real world” scenario where they build a computer game, students can gain experience with project teams, methodologies and core development phases: Discovery, Design, Development and Deployment.

MainFunction Webcast series calendar

Daryll McDade — Thu, 28 Jul 2005 06:37:00 GMT

After much anticipation we've locked down the Webcast calendar over on MainFunction (you'll need to sign-in). All of the pieces have been lined up including our ability to grant continuing education units (CEUs)--we'll be getting things started on Monday August 8th. We finally worked out the schedule so that the series all fall serially so that you'll be able to attend all 4 series without conflict. If your schedule won't allow you to attend all 4 series live, no worries--we'll be recording each part of the series for on-demand viewing. Registration site is on the way and I'll update as soon as possible. For reference, the 4 series titles are;

SERIES 1:Introduction to Developing Modern Web-Based Applications using Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition
SERIES 2: Introduction to Developing Modern Desktop Applications using Visual Basic .NET
SERIES 3: Advanced Placement® Computer Science with .NET and Visual J# 2005 Express Edition
SERIES 4: Data-Driven Applications: Working with Databases and Web Services in .NET and Visual C# 2005 Express Edition

UPDATE:

The registration site is now live (http://www.mainfunction.com/webcasts). Save your spot!

Quasi-podcasting launched on MainFunction

Daryll McDade — Thu, 05 May 2005 20:42:00 GMT

I am SUPER excited about the recent changes that we've launched on MainFunction. Adding Pat Phillips' blog was a great first step. I'm excited that Pat is on board and give her a way to share her experience with .NET in the classroom and her insights on teaching Computer Science to today's students. I'm even more excited about Audio-to-Go. We've partnered up with Carl Franklin (of .NET Rocks! fame) and PWOP Productions to bring "quasi-podcasting" to the high school Computer Science community. I say "quasi" because we haven't gone fully down the path of putting a "download-directly-to-a-device-wrapper" a la ipodder.org for the feed--looking at that for v.next.

There's a mix of commentary and interviews. My two favorites so far are my pal Eric Maino--current Student Ambassador and soon-to-be Microsoft employee-- and Pat's commentary on getting up to speed with the kit. Big thanks to Carl and the PWOP team--they've made this pretty easy.

If you know a Computer Science teacher, pass it along!