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

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,

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/2008/05/27/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

digg_url = 'http://blogs.msdn.com/alfredth/archive/2008/05/22/new-developments-in-xna-resources.aspx'; Well the big announcement at the X NA Blog this week was the new community games option now available at XBOX Live. Well that and the new redesign and other extra added features of the XNA Creators Club site. It’s pretty interesting that premium members will now be able to create games, submit them for community review and then inclusion in XBOX Live Marketplace. But for me the best part was the

digg_url = 'http://blogs.msdn.com/alfredth/archive/2008/05/14/getting-started-tutorials-for-zune-game-development.aspx'; Well it hasn’t taken long for more people to jump on the XNA 3.0 Community Technical Preview that was announced last week . Sam Stoke s has a blog post showing the step by step that one needs to take to get the software installed and ready to run. He’s got a lot of screen captures to really make it clear what is going on. Dan Water s who has cranked out a number of previous helpful

digg_url = 'http://blogs.msdn.com/alfredth/archive/2008/04/22/xna-links-for-teachers-and-other-learners.aspx'; I’ve been hearing from a lot of high school computer science teachers that they are looking for some fun and educational things to do with their AP CS students once the exam is over. For some of these teachers some XNA looks promising. For those people and more I decided to put this collection of resources together in one place. I’m open to adding more if people leave me comments or send

Kelvin Sung from the University of Washington at Bothell has a project that is building XNA Game-Themed assignments for use in computer science classes. I haven't looked at the project too deeply but from the write-up it looks like it might be useful. From the introduction: XNA Game-Themed Assignments ( XGA ) are individual CS1/2 assignments modules designed specifically for selective and gradual adoption. By selective adoption we mean these assignment modules are completely independent from each

Well there are always questions about an handheld game device from Microsoft. Well this isn't it. But what the XNA team did announce today is that XNA Game Studio 3.0 will support creating games for the Zune. And yes there will be multi-player games using the Zune's built in networking. Now that should be interesting. The announcement on the XNA blog is here . There is also a FAQ on the Creators Club web forum. Read the FAQ here . One thing of note is that your games will have access to non-DRM music

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,