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

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

Well I see over at the XNA Team Blog they have announced the latest Dream Build Play competition for people creating XNA Games for the XBOX 360. In Dream-Build-Play 2008 you can build your dream game to compete with other game developers around the world. This year’s contest will feature Xbox360 development only and to ensure that everyone has access we will be giving away one free 12-Month XNA Creators Club Trial membership to everyone that registers. Contestants will compete for $75,000 in prizes

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/2008/05/07/xna-for-zune-game-development-now-in-beta.aspx'; The XNA team has announced that the Community Technical Preview of XNA GSE 3.0 is now available . The big news in this is that now it is possible to develop games for the Zune. So yes, now a handheld device that will play XNA based games. Check out the official announcement here for the details on what, where, when and how. Hey, just in time for something new for after the AP CS exam. :-)