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 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

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

In Canada Microsoft is inviting students and hobbyists who are interested in game development to a free event in Toronto next month. It sounds like a lot of fun and a great chance to learn about XNA Studio Express. I wish I could go myself. Not only is it free but I understand there will be food as well. No one expects you to learn while hungry. Here’s the abstract and schedule for the day. If building games for the Xbox 360 or Windows gets you excited then you have to be at this event. For the first

Krishna Kumar in my group has just opened up a blog with a focus on XNA. In his "welcome to my blog" post Krishna lays out his proposed "program of studies." If you are interested in XNA you will want to either subscribe to his blog or at least set it as a favorite in your web browser of choice so you can follow along at home. Krishna is so far ahead of me on XNA that it is almost embarrassing. More of a teaser from Krishna's blog. Moving onto what this space will offer and how this will differ from