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

There really aren't a lot of books on XNA available yet (though some are coming) and real textbooks seem to be trailing the rest of the books. None of that is stopping the really innovative teachers though. Not in universities, not in community colleges and not even in high schools. Brian Scarbeau has been blogging about his plans for an XNA-based high school computer science course next year. At his post you will find some discussion of scope and sequence as well as information about the resources

Tony over at Computer Science Canada has some ideas for student video game projects . I've had students write variations on some of the ones he suggests. Not being a real player I am not familiar with all of the examples he gives but students probably are. There are lots more games that can be created of course. The old programming standards are things like Hangman and Space Invader clones. I have a few game projects in the classroom project books I wrote. The Visual Basic editions (one for .NET