Contagious Curiosity : Helping

Where’s SoCalDevGal in January 2010?

llangit — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 18:20:40 GMT

Yes, I am a ‘calendar girl’, planning, planning, planning for 2010 already. Lots has been filled in to my January 2010 calendar already, so I thought I’d share here.

Week 1 – Jan 3 to Jan 9

Sat, Jan 9 - 9am to 5pm – ENVISION high school girls tech con at UCSD (opening speaker)

Week 2 – Jan 10 to Jan 16

Mon, Jan 11 - 9am to 5pm – Client Visits (Azure prototyping) in LA
Wed, Jan 13 - 5pm to 9pm – guest teaching at Wintress Technical School in San Diego
Thurs, Jan 14 - 6pm to 9pm – attending PHP UG in San Diego
Sat, Jan 16 - 9am to late – hosting SuperHappyDevHouse in San Jose

Week 3 – Jan 17 to 23

Fri, Jan 22 - 9am to 5pm – custom Azure class for enterprise client in LA
Sat, Jan 23 – 10am to 3pm - ‘Teaching Kids to Code’ session, location in the OC – if you are interested in having your 10 to 17 year old child attend, PING me ASAP via this blog!

Week 4 – Jan 24 to Jan 30

Tues, Jan 26 – 9am to 6pm – speaker for Catalyst conference in SFO
Wed, Jan 27 – 6pm to late – TwiistUp showoff in LA
Thurs, Jan 28 – 9am to 5pm – TwiistUp con in LA
Thurs, Jan 28 – 8pm to late – New Media Vault tech social in LA
Fri/Sat/Sun, Jan 29-31 – She’s Geeky unConference in San Jose
Sat/Sun, Jan 30-31 – SoCalCodeCamp in Fullerton (I’ll be in NorCal, but if you are in SoCal, YOU should go to this one!)

Of course, things change, so I’ll revise here as more events show up.

Teaching Kids to Program at Microsoft in Irvine, CA on Mon, Dec 21

llangit — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 00:26:47 GMT

If your kids are joining us at Microsoft Irvine tomorrow for the testing of 'Teaching Kids to Program Session', please be on time (either 9am OR noon OR 3pm), bring a PC laptop if possible. The address is 3 Irvine Plaza, Suite 1600, Irvine (bldg next to Hyatt). You may drop off your children for one session (you may also stay with them during the class), if dropping off, then please provide us with your (parent’s) cell phone number when you sign in.

We are looking forward to seeing you there.

Teaching Kids Programming – Extending SmallBasic

llangit — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 01:36:27 GMT

I’ve been pair programming with Llewellyn Falco and wanted to share a bit of what we’ve been working on. We’ve written and published some extensions to SmallBasic on CodePlex and would love your feedback.

To use these extensions, you’ll need

1) Small Basic – download it here
2) Small Basic Extensions – download here and then upzip
3) Create a folder named ‘lib’ in the Small Basic directory and copy the two unzipped filed into in ‘SmallBasicFun.dll’ and ‘SmallBasicFun.xml’

We’re also continuing with our new ‘recipe’ method of teaching. To use it, just click the link(s) on the wiki page, then import the requirement and then start coding!

Take a look at our wiki page and try out some recipes with the built-in objects, such as the Turtle, and then the object we’ve added, such as the ‘Tortoise’

We’ll start conducting formal testing with kids (boys or girls, ages 12 to 17) on the dates / times / locations below. If you’d like your child to be a tester, email me via this blog. You do NOT have to bring anything, we’ll have laptops set up, you CAN bring your own laptop if set up per instructions above. It is important to BE ON TIME for the session, if late, you can join the next session. Each session is only two hours. Parents are responsible for transportation and parking. Parents are welcome to stay with their children.

1) Monday, Dec 14 – Microsoft office San Diego pick any one of three 2-hour sessions (starting at 9am, noon or 3pm)

2) Monday, Dec 21 – Microsoft office Irvine, same time slots as above

We intend to use this courseware / extensions at DigiGirlz events and at TeachCamps in California in 2010. We’ll also be making our work broadly available, including screencasts to train-the-teachers in 2010. If you’d like to work with us on this project (or on other kid’s courseware, including Kodu, XNA, Robotics and more, please contact me via this blog).

Happy coding!

Teaching Kids to Code – Graduating from SmallBasic

llangit — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 20:34:53 GMT

Regular blog readers may know of my work with Microsoft’s free kid’s coding IDE, SmallBasic as a tool to introduce the fun of coding to DigiGirlz. As I work with my volunteer developer teams on improving the way we work SmallBasic (more on that later in this post), I am thrilled to see a major enhancement in SmallBasic itself.

Kudos to the incredible Vijaye Raji (a developer on our Visual Studio team). He’s not only created SmallBasic alone and on his own time, but he continues to improve it. He’s recently released version 0.7, which includes the new ‘Graduate’ Feature. This allows SmallBasic applications to be seamlessly migrated to VB.NET.

To see this in action, download SmallBasic (it’s FREE) and install it. Open the IDE and write a simple program (sample screen below).

After writing your program, simply click on the new ‘Graduate’ button on the toolbar and the magic happens. Just fill in the destination on the pop-up dialog, and you’re done!

Just for fun, I’ve installed the Visual Basic Express 2010 beta 2 on my machine and am using it to open the newly created VB project. All of the Express editions of Visual Studio are also free – you could also use Visual Basic Express 2008. Because I did use 2010, there is a ‘update project’ wizard that pops up – just click through those dialogs and enjoy the results (shown below).

Of course, this being Visual Studio Express, you can enjoy all the features included in the Express Editions of Visual Studio, such as the Object Browser (shown below), debugging, etc… I am so excited about these capabilities as we are teaching kids over the long term!

In addition to the new ‘Graduate’ feature, my team of community technical volunteers and I are continuing to work with Vijaye to prioritize requests for improvements to the SmallBasic IDE, based our our work teaching with it.

Along with these improvements in tools, I have been working with community developer and technical instructor Llewellyn Falco on improvements in teaching methods and he’s come up with a great idea to ‘give legs’ to SmallBasic after the live classes we teach. His concept is to use ‘recipes’ for further exploration. We are quite interested in your feedback on this approach. Here’s a link to the wiki where we are posting recipes (partial screenshot shown below as well).

What do you think? Let us know. We are particularly interested in hearing feedback from middle and high-school technology classroom teachers on our new approach, so if you are reading this blog and know a teacher – please pass along the link – thanks!

TeachCamp 2010

llangit — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 18:17:50 GMT

You may know that I've led Microsoft's annual events for high-school aged girls (in SoCal) DigiGirlz for 3 years now. I will continue to do this, plan for 2010 is to host three one-day events (in April) in LA, Irvine and San Diego for DigiGirlz. Also, I will be participating in DigiGirlz events (as an instructor-trainer and as an instructor) in other geographies. An incredible group of community volunteers has been the key to the success of DigiGirlz events.

New for 2010 is a vision to implement a larger initiative for both boys and girls (middle school and high school). The 'big vision' is to create a series of annual events, in partnership with the local technical communities and one university per event, where we teach large numbers of kids technology. The style of the event is based on codeCamp, that is community-driven, with corporate support (Microsoft and more), with community volunteers setting up logistics (registration, schedule, setting up classroom loads, etc...) and teaching.

The first instance will be held in Mountain View on Feb 27 (single day) at Foothill Valley College (site of the hugely successful annual SVCCodeCamp). This is being run by the NorCal technical community. They have decided that their first event will target girls only (300), due to the under-representation of women in technology. I will participate as an instructor-trainer and instructor. Peter Kellner and his wife Tammy (they run SVCCodeCamp) are already on board to help with volunteers as well.

The second instance will be held at UCSD in San Diego the second weekend in July. Llewelyn Falco will co-lead the event with me. We are currently working on curriculum development and are looking for volunteers to assist with this. Jason Frankovitz & Thomas Mueller are also on board helping with curriculum development. As we get closer to the date, we will obviously be looking for a bunch more volunteers.

I would like to run one more instance in SoCal this year. I am looking for suggestions for venue and timeframe.

If you would like to be part of my TeachCamp planning (mailing list), because you'd like to contribute and / or host your own TeachCamp somewhere outside of the Western US, you are welcome to join the conversation too.

If you are interested in helping in any way please send me mail to lynnl at microsoft dot com with the subject 'TeachCamp'

DigiGirlz camp LA for 2009

llangit — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 01:35:15 GMT

We hosted our first-ever DigiGirlz hi-tech camp for high-school aged girls at New Horizons, Culver City, (LA) CA last week (We have hosted previous events in SoCal in Irvine, CA and in San Diego, CA). DigiGirlz is a global program of annual, free events – supported by Microsoft. In SoCal we also have extensive community participation in addition to Microsoft’s support.

Photo of custom DigiGirlz participant certificate:

35 girls participated in activities over two days which included hands on classes (which we developed), demos of cool technologies (Kodu, World-Wide Telescope, Lego Mindstorms etc…), discussion groups with technical professionals and more. For links to the courses, which included ‘Intro to Programming using SmallBasic’, ‘Creating a Video Player in Expression Blend3’ and more, see my previous blog entry on past Digigirlz events in 2009.

The focus and goal of the program is to give girls information (and motivation) around careers which involve technology. Although I could write a really long blog post with detailed information about each aspect of the agenda, I do think that pictures speak volumes.

Here’s me demonstrating Windows 7 multi touch applications on my laptop. My challenge to the girls was ‘what multi touch applications will you create?’

Thanks to photographers, Wm. Marc Salsberry (he took the picture above), Jim (TechFrog) Alden (check out his DigiGirlz photo set on Flickr!) and Anna Webber for capturing the event.

While I am thanking people, local developer, Kim Schmidt took complete charge of organizing the event (during my trip to Africa), simply this event would not have happened without her. We had more than 25 volunteers in total:

From Microsoft – Cindy Palmer, Mary Jane Perez, Linda Routson, Curtis Wong, Avelina Serna
Community – Gina Johnston, Robyn Cohen, Marsha Collier, Heather Meaker, Heather Vescent, Cigdem Patlak, Thomas Mueller, Alexandra Mokh, Akiko Ashley, Mary-Margaret Walker, Leila Curic, Babette Pepaj and more!

More fun photos

From Kim Schmidt – Girls participating in SongSmith competition

DigiGirl taking notes during one of the speaker’s presentations

DigiGirlz events are one my favorite things to do at Microsoft. In addition to watching two girls who were completely new to programming challenge each other at the end of the first day of camp to create the coolest program in SmallBasic (after the intro class) and much more, I got extremely positive feedback from participants.

Also after every DigiGirlz event that I’ve ever participated in I ALWAYS get at least one letter like the one below (which I received today).

"Dear DigiGirlz team,

Thank you so much for putting on DigiGirlz. I've learned so much these past two days! I've already started reading your (Lynn's) book, and will start playing around with SQL Server as soon as I am verified as a student (and can download SQL Server via DreamSpark). The first thing I am going to do is to make a database for my clothes!

Lauren (Berger) has inspired me to start working as an intern and I've contacted Alex (GirlGamer) about an internship at her company. The DigiGirlz experience was truly amazing, and I hope your team continues inspiring girls as you all have inspired me."

DigiGirlz Summer Camp 2009

llangit — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 06:38:30 GMT

We hosted around 20 girls over the past two days at Microsoft’s Irvine, CA office. The global DigiGirlz program is funded by Microsoft and supports annual hosting of either one-day spring events or multi-day summer camps. The goal of the events is to get high-school aged girls interested in technology careers. I am the lead for SoCal. This year I elected to lead 4 events. The two spring events occurred in LA and San Diego. This first camp was held in Irvine. There will be another two-day camp at New Horizons, Culver City, CA on Thursday August 27 and 28. 50 high-school aged girls are registered to attend that camp.

The OC Register covered the Irvine event both on the front page of today’s Local section (two photos and a short story) and on-line (13 photos and stories).

Also some of the leads took pictures. Kim Schmidt was showing the girls SongSmith.

John Hubbard created a Photosynth of the participants.

Here is the list of volunteers (their roles at the camp listed as well) for the Irvine camp:

From Microsoft: Cindy Palmer / proctor
From the local technical community:
Kim Schmidt, Gina Johnston, Chris Savolskis curriculum creators, instructors and proctors
John Hubbard, Michael Hubbard / proctors
Marek Schmidt / setup help
Alexandra Moth / Heather Vescent / Lauren Berger / speakers

and a picture :)

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

We encourage ANYONE to reuse our curriculum. Below is the agenda and after that are all our our PowerPoint presentations.

Camp Agenda

Day One
8:00 – 8:30 - prepare facility, greet girls, gather registration / release forms – Icebreaker
9:00-10:00 – SQL Database class
10:00 – 10:15 – break
10:30-11:45 – Small Basic class
11:45 – 1:00 – Lunch + technical career discussion with all instructors
1:00 – 2:15 – DemoFest – Kodu, MS Surface, SongSmith, Windows 7 multi touch applications
2:15 – 3:00 – speaker, Intern Queen – Lauren Berger

Day Two
8:00 – 8:30 - prepare facility, greet girls
9:00-10:00 – Movie maker class
10:00 – 10:15 – break
10:30-11:45 – XNA Game class
11:45 – 1:00 – Lunch + speaker – Alex Moth from Girl Gamer
1:00 – 2:15 – Blend 3 class
2:15 – 3:00 – speaker, Heather Vescent from the Purple Tornado
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Classroom machine setup requires the following

Internet access
Vista w/ Windows Movie Maker
SQL Server Express 2008 w/Advanced Services
XNA
Visual Studio 2008 Express C#
Expression Blend 3 CTP + Silverlight SDK

We also set up demo machines with
Kodu (Academic edition is via internal MS beta only) and requires wired XBox 360 controller
SongSmith - (non-expiring edition is via internal MS beta only)
Windows 7 Touch Pack Applications on multi touch HP TouchSmart tx2 laptop (software is MS internal only at this time)

We used a samples files for the database class (boyfriends.mdf) and for Blend class. We also created an icebreaker activity. All of these files can be downloaded from this Skydrive location (you must sign in with ANY Windows Live ID first).

Power points

1 Digi Girlz So Cal Databases Kims Final

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2 Digi Girlz Small Basic

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3 Kodu

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4 Making Movies

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5 Digigirlz Xna

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6 Digigirl Creating A Video Player In Blend 3

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Another important piece of information we shared with all of the DigiGirlz is the fact that they (and ANY high-school aged student) can have access to FULL VERSIONS of our software for studying via the DreamSpark program. Included products are shown in the screenshot below.

So, spread the word, find a kid and teach her (or him) how to code today! If you’d like to be a part of a future DigiGirlz event, please read the FAQ below first.

DigiGirlz FAQ

Q. When is the next event? Is there an event in my area?
A. Read the DigiGirlz site – all events are listed there.

Q. I want to send my daughter – what is the age limit? requirement, etc..?
A. Read the DigiGirlz site – all attendance information is listed there. All attendees must register in advance. Each event has specific attendance limits because there are hands on classes (i.e. need to have one computer per attendee.)

Q. I would like to volunteer, what can I do?
A. Great! We need help with logistics management (i.e. answer email, evaluations, etc..) and with technical classroom proctoring. We do conduct ‘train-the-trainer’ sessions at DigiGirlz SoCal prior to each event. Proctors should have technical backgrounds.

Q. Can I use your courseware?
A. Yes, but this is a volunteer effort, so there is no one to support it beyond what I post on this blog.

Q. I would like to be a speaker at a DigiGirlz event, what is the next step?
A. Send an email to the event coordinator (email listed on DigiGirlz site) with your resume / topic

Q. I am a teacher, can I attend?
A. This varies by location. Contact the location lead to ask via the email listed on the DigiGirlz site.

Q. Can boys attend?
A. No, this program is specifically targeted at girls. However, you can use/modify the courses and hold your own event with these topics.

SoCalDevGal shares…’Teaching Kids to Code’

llangit — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 23:04:24 GMT

Here’s the deck from my prezo at SoCalCodeCamp in San Diego (UCSD) – enjoy! Examples included have the following availability – SmallBasic is a free download, Kodu is NOT available to the general public on the PC. Kodu will be released as an XBox 360 game soon.

Abou Teaching Girls Technology

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Report from StepUp First Annual Career Conference in Carson, CA

llangit — Wed, 20 May 2009 06:29:47 GMT

On Saturday after TechEd, I attended the first-ever StepUp Career Conference for underserved high-school aged girls. This event was put on by the national StepUp non-profit, based in Los Angeles and was hosted at the Dermologica HQ in Carson, CA. On this day 30 girls and their professional mentors participated in a series of activities around career development. I was connected to this organization’s local lead, Alexa Brandt, by formerly LA-based do-gooder Sloane Berrent, because of my work with Microsoft’s Digigirlz program.

I loved attending and learned quite a bit about how their very effective professional mentor program runs. I enjoyed observing the activities and the girls seemed quite engaged all day. Below is a picture from a great activity, speed mentoring. During this mentees were encircled by mentors, music was played and when it stopped, girls asked professional women a series of questions. Dancing was encouraged, fun and learning was had by all! This was a very successful event and I intend to continue to work with this organization in Southern California.

Here’s the detailed agenda for the conference:

Agenda:

1. Mentor Check In, Debriefing and Refreshments (9:30-10) - Review event details with Senior Program Manager Alexa Brandt - Girls Arrive (10:00)

2. Welcome, Introduction of Mentor/Mentees and Ice Breakers (10-11)

3. Break into two groups – Successful Sisters & Working Women (swap after sessions)

Working Women: How to Become an Internship Queen by Lauren Berger www.internqueen.com (11:00 – 11:45)

a. What is an internship/part-time job. Why is it beneficial, why would you work for free? Where can you find an internship? Mentors share their internship experiences

b. Strengths with fun self-assessment tests

c. Interview tips and role playing

Successful Sisters: A Career Girl’s Keys To Success Led by Lisa Lee (11:00 – 11:45)

a. What is a Career, My Mission: What Do I Want to Do

b. My Plan: How Do I Make it Happen, Importance of Education, Time Management & Prioritization

c. Women’s History in the Workplace

d. Activity: Each pair will be given an item such as a cel phone, magazine, credit card, etc. The pairs will be asked to brainstorm as many careers and related skills that correlate with the product. The exercise is designed to get girls to look at everyday items in a new way and get them thinking about careers they may not have considered

4. Lunch and Trivia (12:30-1:15) Please sit with your mentee(s) during lunch

5. Career Speed Networking (1:15-1:40)

a. Inner/Outer Circle – all mentors will be in the “inner circle” in which they face out while girls will be on the outer circle, facing in. Music will be playing while everyone walks in a circle. When the music stops, girls will ask 2-3 career related questions to whichever mentor they stop in front of. We will play a handful of rounds.

6. Passport to Professions: Career Stations (1:40 – 2:25)

a. Mentors will be grouped together by industry. Each industry will have a table where you will sit. Girls will have a passport booklet. They have to find mentors that meet certain requirements such as find a woman that works with clients or patients. How does she work with different personality types?

b. If you meet the bill, chat with the girl and then stamp her passport

7. Closing Remarks and Gift Bags (2:25-2:30) - Girls turn in their passport for a Dermologica goody bag. Volunteers get bags too!

Report from TechEd – WomenBuild 2.0 SeriousPlay with LEGOs

llangit — Tue, 19 May 2009 22:12:44 GMT

Happy to have led the Women in Technology event at TechEd last week. Asli Bilgin and I have been working with a team at Microsoft to build this event brand for a year now. Microsoft has hosted WomenBuild events across the US and Australia already and intends to host more in the future. (Take a look at the original video of the day Asli and I met and the day we got this idea – just for fun.)

The idea is to hold events which implement a type of speed group problem solving facilitated by table leaders and LEGO bricks. We’ve worked directly with the originator of the SeriousPlay concept, Robert Rasmussen to customize the implementation for WomenBuild. We were quite lucky to have Robert over from Denmark to act as lead facilitator for this event at TechEd.

At each event small groups of women and men who are interested in working on this problem (too few women working in technology) build models with LEGO bricks to answer directed questions around this issue. We have a Facebook group to share knowledge and to connect people who are interested in WomenBuild. At TechEd we had over 100 participants in WomenBuild 2.0. To get a sense of the event, take a look at the video below (thanks, again, to our friends at TechZulu for this one!):

So, what were the key learnings from WomenBuild 2.0? I’ve compiled the feedback (after building a model to represent their ideas around a specific question related to WiT), each participant then shares ‘their story’, and then writes down their key thoughts. Here’s what some of the participants had to say about these questions:

1) Why are you here? i.e. motivations for wanting to make change

Together we can improve the situation

To meet other technical women

Increase the visibility of women in technology (many people said this)

Want to get new ideas on how to solve this problem

My co-worker (a female) asked to attend

My graduating class in IT had too few women in it

2) What is essence of the problem?

Work/Life Balance – too much to do, especially if raising kids (many responses)

Different expectations “there is a mental wall – false expectations”, IT not seen as feminine, technology implemented via a ‘male vision’ (good old boys club), women feel alone or apart from the group of men at work in IT, women must work at least 2x as hard to prove their technical competence as men

Women don’t expect to have careers in IT, area not seen as attractive to women, it is not expected that women will do these jobs,

Women are not encouraged to be creative or to ‘take risks’, limits their ability to be effective at work

Women are isolated, feel alone, ‘only women in the room’

3) What actions could be taken to address this problem?

Educate girls about IT career possibilities – participate in DigiGirlz, level the playing field at an early age (many, many responses!)

Be more visible as women in IT, i.e. attend more IT events, public speaking, educate, act as role models, mentors

Act as a mentor to a girl (many mentioned younger family members or neighbors)

Train (enlighten) teachers and parents about gender bias in STEM education

Consciously attempt to ‘hear from’ everyone in the room, both men and women (at work)

Reward risk taking women at work, break or change the rules

Listen to my wife more closely (multiple responses!)

Accept part-time work from busy women, especially mothers

Ask my husband/boyfriend, etc…to take on more family responsibilities

Take time for me to learn, get certified, attend user groups, attend conferences, seek out a mentor

Engage girls in Green Development and Green IT

Bring Robotics to girls

What’s next for WomenBuild?

We are evaluating the first year and planning for year two roll out. We are attempting to sharpen the focus of the event to result in more actionable information. Were you there? Have you attended WomenBuild somewhere in the US? We’d love your feedback! (via this blog or our facebook group). We are also considering what we call *Build programs, i.e. GirlzBuild (for DigiGirlz), etc… We would also be interested in your thoughts on that.

Also, I must thank the 10 table facilitators who made WomenBuild 2.0 possible – Cidgem Patlak, Kim Schmidt, Cindy Palmer, Elisabeth Vanderveldt, Julie Lehrman, Jenny Nielsen, Karen Henderson, Dana (from Hynesite), Julie Yack, and Catherine Eibner.

Report from TechEd – MVP pre-show summit

llangit — Mon, 18 May 2009 22:19:44 GMT

Sunday before TechEd I represented local evangelists at the TechEd MVP pre-summit. In addition to meeting several MVPs for the first time, I got a chance to plan new events with key SoCal MVPs (most of whom also lead or actively participate in local User Groups as well) -- James Johnson, Denny Cherry, Mike Vincent, Andrew Karcher, Mark Rosenberg and more attended.

Here are some of the ideas for new types of events that we kicked around – what do think?

1) Give Camp – a weekend coding smack down, to be held at a university, with teams of developers working to create solutions that will benefit non-profits. Judging, technical resources (i.e. help) from MS and more. MS did this in Dallas last year with great success. Also post solutions to CodePlex. (Later in the week I had dinner with Sara Ford, who runs CodePlex for Microsoft and she thought this was a great idea and agreed to highlight any projects we might produce there. Also tie this project to James’ NING site - ‘Geeks Without Borders’ to increase reach beyond SoCal.

2) Proctored Hands on Labs with prerequisites – repeating our highly successfully Silverlight 2.0 HOLs last year, with themes of WPF and/ Windows 7 development. Have a first night (Tues) with lecture, which is also recorded, in case you can’t make it, then the lab night is on Thursdays. Repeat frequently, host at technical training centers throughout SoCal.

3) geekSpeak guests – I am always looking for interesting new guests for my weekly webcast series (MSDN geekSpeak) and I met several MVPs at this summit who I’ve invited to appear on the show this summer.

SoCalDevGal has an idea…Virtual DigiGirlz

llangit — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 23:11:36 GMT

Inspiration does come from unexpected places, doesn’t it? I’ve been thinking, for well over a year now, on how to take the Microsoft DigiGirlz program to the next level – that is beyond live events to scale it online. Well, I think I’ve got a good idea, which I’ve been floating around to a couple of people and today I got that extra push at, of all places, the UPS Store. Who knew that the women carefully packing my shipment has been a programmer for 25 years? Well, I sure didn’t until after I talked to her a bit. She still codes in her spare time, for love of it, even though she is semi-retired now. Without recounting the entire conversation, I’ll just say ‘thanks’, because today I am writing my idea as a proposal – I am thinking pretty big, wish me luck. I’ll post progress updates here as I get them.

Teaching Coding to Kids? Try Visual Studio Learning Pack

llangit — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 04:31:19 GMT

The Visual Studio Learning Pack 2.0 is a software package created by Microsoft to help students learn about computer programming. It consists of the following five components:

Sort Designer Control is a supplementary teaching tool developed to help students learn the basic concepts, algorithms, and implementations of popular computer sorting algorithms. It supports bubble and insertion sorting. The control generates initial values automatically and demonstrates intermediate states in the sorting process. It also generates sorting source code for both Visual Basic and C#.
Search Designer Control is a teaching tool developed to help students learn the basic concepts, algorithms, and implementations of popular data search algorithms. It supports binary and sequential searches. The control generates initial values automatically and demonstrates intermediate states in the searching process. It also generates source code for both Visual Basic and C#.
Using the Visual Sort Designer and Visual Search Designer Controls teachers can easily develop a sample program to demonstrate the fundamentals of sorting and searching. They can also customize the control's appearance by simply dragging the control onto a form and setting its properties. These visual demonstrations help in teaching programming concepts and increase students' interest in learning.
Visual Declarative Designer is an intuitive variable declaration tool designed for novice programmers. During the coding process the student can declare variables of various types and generate the corresponding source code. Visual Variable Declarative Designer provides a visual approach to variable declaration. Teachers in the Information Technology (IT) field can use this designer to teach students the basic concepts of variable declaration and naming, variable types, access modifiers, and initial values.
Assistant Class Designer is a visual class designer for novice programmers. This designer guides students through the processes of adding classes, properties, methods and events. The designer also generates the corresponding source code for new classes. By using this designer, teachers and students can easily create and configure complicated classes. Assistant Class Designer provides an intuitive and interactive method for designing classes and helps students to understand key object-oriented programming concepts such as classes, encapsulation, inheritance, and polymorphism. The Assistant Class Designer generates source code for C# only.
Visual Programming Flow Chart is a supplementary teaching tool designed to help students understand program control flow. It generates flow charts for functions and saves them in the JPG picture format. This tool is easily activated from the Visual Studio Integrated Development Environment (IDE) by simply right-clicking on a function name and choosing “Generate flow chart…” from the context menu. The resulting flowchart can be customized by changing its colors and other effects. This visual tool provides an intuitive way to explore source code, to examine its control flow, and to identify logic errors.

VSLP Overview

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Download details: Visual Studio Learning Pack

See the Future of Software

llangit — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 06:46:52 GMT

Check out this fun video showing Microsoft innovations

Microsoft DreamSpark - Free software for students

llangit — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 20:24:14 GMT

We've extended DreamSpark to include both college AND high school students! You can get anything shown below (and more - see the DreamSpark website) for FREE! These are full-version products (not trials or versions that expire). This is a fantastic way for students to learn. Take advantage of it.

Microsoft DreamSpark