For those of you who joined us at the Royal Festival Hall on 1st October and, especially for those who were otherwise engaged, please find below the session by Thore Graepel, Joaquin Quiñonero Candela and Ralf Herbrich on Microsoft Research Talk on CS Inside Halo 3 True Ranking System: If you are unable to view the above clip, please do let me know. Best wishes, Allison

With the arrival of XNA Game Studio 3.0 on the scene (now released and deployable to Xbox 360!), I’ve gotten a few questions that I thought might be useful to share with other people. 1) I want to write a platform game using XNA, but it’s hard to find examples.  How can I get started? The bad news is that yes, there aren’t that many examples of XNA platform games at the moment.  A few resources are here: http://www.garagegames.com/products/torque/x/starterkits/platformer http://ie.youtube.com/watch?v=VB3lTBE9lLg

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.

I love my Zune.  It goes everywhere that I go.  It gets me up-to-speed on tech news on the way to work, helps me ignore weirdos on the Luas, keeps me motivated at the gym, and drowns out annoying cell phone rings & electronic games on trains (honestly I would pay extra for silent train cars). However this week when I turned on my Zune I found a message saying “Contact Support.”  I did and it’s really busted.  I don’t know what happened, but my best guess is that it is protesting

I recently had the opportunity to meet with Microsoft Ireland’s new team of Student Partners.  They were incredibly enthusiastic, and I’m looking forward to the great things they’re planning on doing over the next school year. I talked to the students about as much as I could cram into a little over an hour.  So we did a brief overview of Silverlight (they even got a sneak preview of the Silverlight NBC Olympics application!), talked about XNA and game development and lastly walked through

I recently had the opportunity to meet with Microsoft Ireland’s new team of Student Partners.  They were incredibly enthusiastic, and I’m looking forward to the great things they’re planning on doing over the next school year. I talked to the students about as much as I could cram into a little over an hour.  So we did a brief overview of Silverlight (they even got a sneak preview of the Silverlight NBC Olympics application!), talked about XNA and game development and lastly walked through

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,

Last week I posted news about the Windows XP Professional for Embedded Systems Event at TVP on 21st October. Following on from that post, I’d also like to tell you about a series of online seminars relating to specific aspects of Windows Embedded technology. While not perhaps for those of you already teaching embedded technologies, the seminars may prove useful if you are considering future curriculum developments.   Windows Embedded and Gaming 16th September 2008 9:00 - 10:00 Windows Embedded

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

Hi Everyone If you have been wondering 'where next for the web?' this event might just be for you and there is an early bird saving for the first three hundred people to book. Click here to reserve a place. And if you have any ideas for a topic you would like to see presented at re mix UK and have a good idea of just who you’d like to present it, there is a chance you can get it added to the mash up. Best for the weekend, Allison