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

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.

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.

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.

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,

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