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 am struggling to catch up from my vacation. One of the trailing points in my activity is blogging – both reading and writing. I’ve got over 500 blog posts (mostly in the education category – aren’t you all on vacation?) to read. But I’ve come up with a few things already that are worth giving some attention to. The $40 Billion Gorilla – Ben Chun had an interesting post complete with slide show on his talk titled “ Bringing a $40 Billion Gorilla Into Your Classroom: Using Video Games to Teach Computer

Over a the XNA blog they have announced a new 2D game tutorial . Two hours of video and other information. I can’t wait to get back from vacation to check it out (just don’t tell my wife :-) ) var dzone_url = 'http://blogs.msdn.com/alfredth/archive/2008/07/08/2d-xna-game-tutorial.aspx'; var dzone_title = '2D XNA Game Tutorial'; var dzone_blurb = '2D XNA Game Tutorial'; var dzone_style = '1'; digg_url = "http://blogs.msdn.com/alfredth/archive/2008/07/08/2d-xna-game-tutorial.aspx";digg_title = "2D

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

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

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/2008/05/16/links-from-my-talk-at-stevens-institute-of-technology.aspx'; Yesterday I gave one of the keynote talks at Stevens Institute of Technology’s second annual high school computer science workshop . Ursula Wolz , The College of New Jersey, was a tough act to follow with her great presentation/demo on Scratch . Scratch is one of my favorite teaching tools and I learned several things about it that I didn’t know. And then it was my turn. I did

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