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

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/2008/06/03/may-posts-in-review.aspx'; May was an interesting month for me in several ways. One area that I struggled with though was blogging. Perhaps it is because the school year is winding down but I could not seem to stay on a roll. Still there were a couple of posts that received a lot of traffic. XNA was big because of the Zune announcement. And people seemed to be interested in projects for use in their classrooms. I have a long post about

digg_url = 'http://blogs.msdn.com/alfredth/archive/2008/05/27/who-cares-how-fast-the-code-is.aspx'; Ironically one of the problems teachers can have with teaching about optimizing programs is that computers are a) so fast now and b) getting faster all the time. Students often do not see the need to create more efficient algorithms because they assume that what they have is fast enough and if it isn’t then the next computer they buy will “fix” the problem by being faster. And truth be told with most

So I'm still way behind on blogging to say nothing of my email. I spent the last day as a vacation day with my father who I don't see often enough. I've also been fixing his computer, showing how to use his new GPS device, and setting up his DVD player. It's been time well spent and of course the best part has been spending some time with him. I did run into two people who have had time to blog about the Game Development in Computer Science Education conference though and thought that the least I

I am on the M/V Celebrity Century at sea out of Miami as I write this. The Internet is expensive and I'm not sure I want to spend the money for it. These are my first day notes and while I intended to write every night the need for sleep overtook me after the first night. I will write more about it this week though I promise. Being at a conference on a cruise ship is different from being on a land based conference. For one thing we are out of range of shore based Internet and cell phone coverage.

I just found out that there is a special FREE pre-conference workshop on developing assignments for CS1/CS2 courses that use the Xbox 360 and XNA. If you are planning on attending SIGCSE (I'll be there!) and looking for a pre-conference workshop this might just be a good one if you have an interest in using game development to teach CS concepts. The announcement follows: ANNOUNCING FREE SIGCSE Pre-Conference Workshop Developing CS1/2 Programming Assignments on the XBOX 360 Console Prof. Kelvin Sung,

Over the holiday I did some browsing around the Internet. I found a couple of new blogs to follow, read some posts by people who hadn't blogged in a while, and just stumbled across some interesting things while looking for something completely different. Among my discoveries were some interesting curriculum links that I thought were worth sharing. One of them is a set of online modules for teaching Visual Basic written by Professor Larry Press from California State University, Dominguez Hills. The

I would imagine that a lot of people are looking for interesting things to do with brand new computers this week. Some people are (I hope) looking for ways to teach young people about programming. Or perhaps you are looking for your self regardless of your age. Well it seems like this is also a time when I am finding updates on some of the popular and more interesting beginning programming languages. For example I received an announcement from the Scratch team about a conference they are running

Torque X is an extremely powerful game development tool (built on Microsoft's XNA) from GarageGames. Garage Games is running a special edition of their Torque X Boot Camps specifically designed for educators. It's coming in January and will be hosted by the Guildhall at SMU (one of the premier university game development programs in the world). The full announcement is here but I have included some of the announcement below: January 17-19th, 2008 The Guildhall at SMU, Plano, TX Torque X has just