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/2008/05/14/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

The SIGCSE mailing list recently had a long discussion about plagiarism in the context of philosophy of teaching statements being submitted with applications for professorial jobs. While the discussion on plagiarism was interesting what got me thinking was my the idea of a statement of teaching philosophy. Specifically what was mine? When I think back on the best teachers I ever had, ever worked with, and what I saw as what I copied about them several things came to mind. Knowledgeable Enthusiastic

Last week I was hanging out in Texas doing some training on Silverlight/Evangelism training. I was staying in Irving - a huge tech center - more or less just like any other suburban tech city (Redmond/San Jose/Reston). But at some point, I had a sudden need for a new firewire cable, so I ran down to the local Frys in Dallas (1.5 hours away). I drove over and here's what I saw: WTF Texas....WTF... Also while in Texas I made a visit to Allen High School with a collegue - Alfred Thompson . We saw highschoolers

Short attention span? No problem. Hilary Pike has created a short quick moving demo/screen cast on modifying an existing 2-dimensional XNA based video game . In just 10 minutes she walks the viewer through some key gaming concepts and then adds Collision Detection and Score Keeping to the game. Also at her blog post you will find links to other XNA resources and of course the sample code for the game used in the demo. This demo will give a good overview of what one can do with existing game code

There really aren't a lot of books on XNA available yet (though some are coming) and real textbooks seem to be trailing the rest of the books. None of that is stopping the really innovative teachers though. Not in universities, not in community colleges and not even in high schools. Brian Scarbeau has been blogging about his plans for an XNA-based high school computer science course next year. At his post you will find some discussion of scope and sequence as well as information about the resources

Tony over at Computer Science Canada has some ideas for student video game projects . I've had students write variations on some of the ones he suggests. Not being a real player I am not familiar with all of the examples he gives but students probably are. There are lots more games that can be created of course. The old programming standards are things like Hangman and Space Invader clones. I have a few game projects in the classroom project books I wrote. The Visual Basic editions (one for .NET

My friend Brian Scarbeau who teaches computer science at a high school in Florida gave me this link to a discussion of the path one could/should take towards becoming a professional game developer. A lot of students I talk to want to become professional game developers but they really don't have any idea what is actually required to get there. This list gives something of an idea. Computer games, especially console games, involve a lot more than programming. There is graphic design, story telling,