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,

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

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/2008/05/22/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

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