One way to consume Silverlight is to create Popfly Games, I have made a series of silent videos that show how to utilize the Popfly Game Creator site. http://www.popfly.com I used the community clips that is a free download from Microsoft and VERY easy to use. This will take you through the entire process, from getting a liveID to building a simple game with scoring! Of course you might want to view the video on Live ID sign up to make sure it isn't a scam. :) There are 10 videos so you will need

I recently had the opportunity to meet with Microsoft Ireland’s new team of Student Partners.  They were incredibly enthusiastic, and I’m looking forward to the great things they’re planning on doing over the next school year. I talked to the students about as much as I could cram into a little over an hour.  So we did a brief overview of Silverlight (they even got a sneak preview of the Silverlight NBC Olympics application!), talked about XNA and game development and lastly walked through

I recently had the opportunity to meet with Microsoft Ireland’s new team of Student Partners.  They were incredibly enthusiastic, and I’m looking forward to the great things they’re planning on doing over the next school year. I talked to the students about as much as I could cram into a little over an hour.  So we did a brief overview of Silverlight (they even got a sneak preview of the Silverlight NBC Olympics application!), talked about XNA and game development and lastly walked through

OK it is the start of the long weekend – well once my wife gets back from school where she had just a little more to do to be ready for students on Tuesday. So it is time to think about some game news. OK so I’m thinking about more help to create games since I really think that turning consumers into creators should be a goal. So hear now the news. The Popfly team announces a bunch of new features. The Game Creator has gone from alpha to beta and with this there are badges to earn, new profile pages,

The Game Development in Computer Science Education conference has been renamed and this year’s event is called the Fourth International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games . This is the premier educational conference for faculty who use game development to teach computer science concepts and principles. In the past we have had a small number of high school computer science faculty come on the conference but I am hoping that by giving people early warning we can get more this time. A lot

I am struggling to catch up from my vacation. One of the trailing points in my activity is blogging – both reading and writing. I’ve got over 500 blog posts (mostly in the education category – aren’t you all on vacation?) to read. But I’ve come up with a few things already that are worth giving some attention to. The $40 Billion Gorilla – Ben Chun had an interesting post complete with slide show on his talk titled “ Bringing a $40 Billion Gorilla Into Your Classroom: Using Video Games to Teach Computer

It’s just over a week until I head out (down to?) San Antonio for this year’s National Education Computing Conference (NECC). I’ll start on Saturday the 28th with the annual CS & IT Symposium . This year’s event looks to be the best yet. I hope to see many people who read my blog as well as many old friends there. I’m really excited about this event. I will also be at several of the SIGCT events. The SIGCT wiki has a list of events at NECC that should be of interest to computer science teachers.

digg_url = 'http://blogs.msdn.com/alfredth/archive/2008/05/16/links-from-my-talk-at-stevens-institute-of-technology.aspx'; 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 several things about it that I didn’t know. And then it was my turn. I did

Por si no lo conocían, Popfly es una nueva plataforma de Microsoft la cual pretende el ayudar al usuario a crear Sitios Web en un dos por tres o generar Mashups que en forma sencilla no significa más que generar una aplicación en la cual convivan diversas aplicaciones simultáneamente...Sé que suena raro, pero un ejemplo sencillo y que todos conocemos es Facebook, uno de los ejemplos de la Web 2.0 en donde en un mismo sitio se convive con múltiples aplicaciones que crean

    The age old question of "how do we get more students interested in STEM (science tech engineering math) has come up one too many times.  It's time for me to write what I know (so here you go!):     A couple programs Microsoft created to help students get interested in technology: http://s2b.experience.com/alumnus/channel?channel_id=microsoft_s2b&page_id=home http://www.microsoft.com/about/diversity/programs/digigirlz.mspx   Some ideas on leveraging technology