What a fantastic event, Student Day (SD) attracted over 1200 students both from Universities and High Schools around NSW and some interstate. Student Day was the platform for the official launch of Microsoft Dreamspark and StudentstoBusiness (S2B) in Australia. If you haven't heard already, Dreamspark is a Microsoft student program designed to offer all tertiary students access to Microsoft’s designer and developer tools for FREE ! Dreamspark will also be rolled out to High Schools early next year.

The ground swell of interest in XNA Games Studio never ceases to amaze me - it's truly an underground phenomenon! Accordingly, there's never a shortage of materials produced by members of the community teaching you how to do things with XNA. A while back I posted a video of a great presentation that Luke Drumm delivered at UNSW - well, there's a perfect complementer to that video, in the form of Dan Waters's 12 part video tutorials on how to create an Xbox / PC game from scratch using XNA. Video:

Nick Hodge , Microsoft's Professional Geek (yes, that is his actual job title), recently interviewed Ross Brown and Penny Drennan from QUT about lessons learnt from the first ever semester of teaching the Bachelor of Games and Interactive Entertainment degree . Forgetting for a minute some of the concerns raised about the sudden influx of students wishing to study gaming, I know there's a few other universities out there who are also in the same spot who this might be of interest to. You can view