Interesting Links 1 February 2010

All sorts of good things last week. Tops among them was a visit to Stevens Institute of Technology for a workshop with a great group of high school computer science teachers. You’ll see more posts on the things I learned there during the course of the week. But here now some links that I hope you will find useful and interesting.

Tom Ziegmann (on twitter at @tomontech blogging at Tom On Tech) was a visitor to Microsoft’s Redmond HQ last week. While he was there he had a chance to interview members of the Microsoft Surface team. His video is posted at Microsoft Surface – What is it and how does it work?

Texas people heading to TCEA Please sign up for some of the Microsoft workshops Pretty please. They'll be good I promise.

The US Imagine Cup Twitter account (@imaginecupus) sent out a link to an article about learning the basic techniques for XNA 2D Basic Collision Detection. In to game development check this article out and let me know what you think. BTW if you are wondering about the educational value of having students create games this article on Science Daily (Learning the Art of Creating Computer Games Can Boot Student Skills) might be interesting to you. Apparently there are good things happening for students who create there own games.

Speaking of gaming the people behind the conference have a proposal  to create an ACM special interest group called SIGGAME. If you’re a member of the ACM you may want to take a look and sign on your support if you think it is worthwhile.

Key Royal (@kenroyal) posted a link to National Science Competition Searches for America's Top Young Scientist for all your science geek students.

Clint Rutkas (on Twitter at @ClintRutkas) was a member of the academic team that I am on but has started doing some new and interesting things at Microsoft. His profile is now on Microspotting! - https://microsoftjobsblog.com/blog/clint-rutkas-microspotting/ Take a look and see what sort of interesting things are going on.

From the @iRobotSPARK Twitter account that is sponsored by iRobot I saw that Hawaii Gov. Lingle announced $2.8M for Robotics education.

Governor Linda Lingle announced today in her State of the State Address that she has authorized the use of $2,805,200 in federal stimulus funds to enhance robotics education programs in Hawai‘i’s schools.

That is serious money in a state the size of Hawai’i. I’ve seen a lot of good things come from robotics education programs so I think this sounds like a great idea. It gets kids creating things, getting creative, and learning all sorts of skills. Good for Hawai’i.