Links from my talk at Stevens Institute of Technology

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 have a wonderful time at this event. I had the chance to talk one to one with a number of teachers which was great. I especially enjoyed putting some faces to names of people I had exchanged email with recently. Also several people were nice enough to tell me that they read this blog which is always exciting to hear.

A lot of people don't realize how much work (including paper work) is involved in field trips so something like this is always an effort for teachers. It is far from a "day off" but really means more work. So thanks to all of the teachers who put in the extra work to take their students on a field trip to Stevens.

During my talk I mentioned several products/tools that I think are good ways, or at least fun ways which makes them good for me, to learn more about programming. I have to send the nice people at Stevens a list of links so I thought I would post the list here as well.

Popfly - is one thing I have written about before. My hands on lab which I mentioned during my talk is posted here. (More of what I have written about Popfly here.)

Popfly Wiki for tutorials and other helpful information

RoboChamps – Online, Virtual Robot Competition – This competition is run using Microsoft Robotics Studio.

XNA Game Studio Express – Creating games using C# and a powerful set of libraries and other resources. (See here for a bunch more that I have written about XNA. Or start here for a bunch of links I put in one post.)

Speaking of robots, in the panel discussion IPRE came up. IPRE (Institute for Personal Robots in Education) is a joint research project with Georgia Tech and Bryn Mawr that uses simple inexpensive robots to teach programming.