Interesting Links 12 July 2010
I’m up early this morning to take a flight out to California. I’ll be presenting at the annual CSTA CS & IT Symposium tomorrow. I’m very excited as I hear there is a full house expected. Since I was on the program committee (and highly honored to be part of it) and had a hand in picking the presentations I’m sure happy people saw things they wanted to attend. And honestly there are several sessions in each time slot I would like to be at myself. Shaping up to be a great event. I will be blogging afterwards. And probably Twittering live (follow me on Twitter @AlftedTwo if interested). So in that spirit I’d like to start off with a couple of links to blog posts by high school computer science teachers who are bringing up some interesting discussion points. I hope you will visit them and add you opinions.
Garth talks about the confusion between teaching math and computer programming for many students in a post called Algebra vs. programming syntax – x=x+1 makes no sense . This a a point I have heard before. The syntax we use in programming often looks like what they do in algebra but it doesn’t always mean the same thing. This can be confusing. Some comments already but I hope you will add to them.
Hélène Martin writes about how to create computer scientists. It is a great post that relates a lot from her personal experience. The comments are all worth reading as well. I hope you will join in.
Now for some Imagine Cup news. The world wide finals of Microsoft’s Imagine Cup competitions were held this past week in Poland. I didn’t get to go but follower along from home on Twitter, blog posts and news releases. It was quite an event.
A pair of high school students were the top team in the Windows 7 Rockstar event. I’ve blogged about that before so the big news is that they were the first people to get Windows Phone 7 phones outside of Microsoft developers. My friends who were at the Imagine Cup tell me these are some really great kids too so we’re all very happy for them.
Michelle Obama congratulated Imagine Cup 2010 winners via video. (Check it out!)
From Martin Schray (@mschray) I learned about a Windows Phone 7 Development webinar on 7/15 with Rob Cameron. If you want to learn about creating games for Windows Phone 7, this sessions with Rob Cameron during the AT&T Developer Webcast, XNA Game Development for Windows Phone 7 may be just the place to start.
Channel 9 recorded an introduction to "Small Basic" with Vijaye Raji who is the man behind the project. View it at https://channel9.msdn.com/shows/The+Knowledge+Chamber/Intro-to-Small-Basic-with-Vijaye-Raji/
Bob Familiar (My new manager and on Twitter @bobfamiliar) Posted some information about WebMatrix which was announced last week: You know the question…What is the WebMatrix? Web Matrix has some great potential in education so please visit Bob’s blog and check it out.