Interesting Links 22 March 2010

What a week. Very busy with several speaking engagements including a set of hands on labs with high school students at the University of New Hampshire Tech Day event. We built a simple game of Pong. Friday was a tech career talk to several groups of students at Middlesex Community College. A lot of universities and colleges in New England took advantage of spring break to create events for high school students to promote both their schools and careers in computer science and information technology. It’s a great thing for everyone.

I did Tweet a bunch of links over the past week but a lot of them wound up in regular blog posts. And some of them were interesting at the time but not of long term interest. Here then is the best of the rest. Oh and be sure to visit the main page for this blog and look through some of the more recent posts. Leave comments as well. I value your input – especially if you think I am wrong about something.

Talk about perspective – Rich White (@RichWhite) posted a link to this image of 20 GB of disk storage from 1980 with a view of 32 GB of storage today.

If that doesn’t make you go “Wow!” I don’t know what will.

Bre over at Dell (@ Edu4U) Announced the 2010 Totally Wired Teacher Award Sponsored By Dell.

What is the Totally Wired Teacher Award?

The Totally Wired Teacher Award is inspired by Ypulse.com founder Anastasia Goodstein’s book, Totally Wired: What Teens & Tweens Are Really Doing Online , and the challenges she observed when teachers tried to integrate technology into their public school classrooms.

The goal of the award is to recognize a teacher who has overcome these challenges and is inspiring to both students and other educators.

From Zero to t-shirt shooting cannon in two weeks Clint Rutkas (who also blogs at Monkey See, Monkey Build by Clint Rutkas) Tells the story of how he and a few others were asked to build a phone controlled t-shirt shooting cannon in only two weeks. This is part one of a multi part series that will provide a lot of information for people who want to build their own.

The XNA Game Studio Team blog as a lot of new information about XNA 4.0 community preview and if you are interested in game development you will want to check it out.

What Employers Want is a post about making the case for Computer Science in education on the CSTA blog. It’s a good read and if you are at all interested in preparing students for future careers you should take a good look at it.

Speaking of employers and careers, @CACMmag reports that IT job rolls grew by 12,900 in January and 14,000 in February, suggesting a reversal of recession-driven cutbacks. Communications of the ACM or CACM for short is one of the magazines I read the minute it shows up in my mail box (the hard copy version) and one of the best CS/IT news web sites going. Visit it online at https://cacm.acm.org/