I have been remiss in following news at Very Silly Games this summer. Fortunately for me Brian Scarbeau has been paying better attention. From his blog I found out that Rob Miles is about ready to release some curriculum materials for teaching programming using XNA. Rob has written a great text book called Microsoft® XNA Game Studio 2.0: Learn Programming Now! that I know a lot of teachers are using. Having some curriculum materials from Rob seems very interesting to me. Rob says “ It will be based

Me complace anúnciales que ya están listo los sites en español de XNA y de SharePoint Server 2007 para Desarrolladores XNA Microsoft XNA está formado por software líder en la industria, servicios, recursos y comunidades que se centran en permitir a los desarrolladores de juegos tener éxito en la plataforma de juego de Microsoft. En este site encontraras entrenamiento, presentaciones, novedades, comunidades y el Club de Creadores… Saludos Fernando García Loera MVP Lead | Community Consultant | Latin

I just found out about the RampUp program. Briefly this is a program that lets people sign up for and take online training on various Microsoft developer technology such as web development and Visual Studio. There are special tracks for Java developers and for developers who want to upgrade their skills from Visual Basic 6.0 to Visual Basic .NET. Speaking of the later, the description is: Microsoft Visual Basic 2005 is the ideal environment for a Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 developer to extend existing

digg_url = 'http://blogs.msdn.com/alfredth/archive/2008/05/07/xna-for-zune-game-development-now-in-beta.aspx'; The XNA team has announced that the Community Technical Preview of XNA GSE 3.0 is now available . The big news in this is that now it is possible to develop games for the Zune. So yes, now a handheld device that will play XNA based games. Check out the official announcement here for the details on what, where, when and how. Hey, just in time for something new for after the AP CS exam. :-)

I've been talking to a lot of schools lately that are experimenting with game development using XNA in their courses. For some of them at least some of the motivation is to attract more students into their computer science programs. Springbrook High School has a video advertisement that shows students playing one of the games they have created. It is an interesting way to get students to think about taking some real computer science courses. Other reasons for adopting XNA courses include wanting

Well I'm on the road again. Today I am flying to Miami for the Game Development in Computer Science conference . The conference takes place on a cruise ship so there is no Internet or cell phone coverage - at least not as a reasonable price. So I'm posting a few things in advance in hopes that you will not miss me. Since I am in gaming sort of mind I thought I'd pass on some links to a series of posts by Betsy Aoki . The series involves creating a simple 2D game in XNA that involves collision detection.

To make the most use of this and its subsequent post, you should download the XNA 2D Collision detection sample and look over both the code and documentation in Game Studio 2.0. This post was written with the game.cs file open, so may as well read it in the same vein...the blog post is meant to help you decipher the sample even if you've never seen C# before. Frankly, before I set about the write this post, I had never written in C# either. But the powerful awesomeness of the rectangle collision

make your development experience 1000% smoother Full details and links to the videos may be found

The SIGCSE mailing list recently had a long discussion about plagiarism in the context of philosophy of teaching statements being submitted with applications for professorial jobs. While the discussion on plagiarism was interesting what got me thinking was my the idea of a statement of teaching philosophy. Specifically what was mine? When I think back on the best teachers I ever had, ever worked with, and what I saw as what I copied about them several things came to mind. Knowledgeable Enthusiastic

Back in November I listed some high school computer science teacher blogs that I am following. At the top of my list was Brian Scarbeau about whom I said " does not post a lot but I always find a lot of value in what he does post. " Well lately he's been a blogging house of fire. He recently started teaching a course on game development using XNA with his advanced students. They are learning C# as the programming language and also learning a lot about the various concepts that go into making a modern