Interesting Links 13 September 2010

Lots of good links this week. And if you are visiting via the web I wrote a rare week-end post on Object Oriented Programming.Design that I hope you’ll take a look at. Also most of these links were sent out first on Twitter. You can follow me on Twitter at @AlfredTwo.

The speaker presentations from the 2010 CS&IT Symposium are now available at the CSTA web site. There are two that I had a part in including Computer Science, Game Development and the XNA Game Studio Platform where Steve Scanlan spends more of the presentation talking about how he uses XNA and game development with his students.

Download presentation as PDF (2 zipped files) View streaming video of session

From @MSTechStudent is the announcement that Microsoft US is giving away an Xbox 360 console with the new Kinect each week to one random person who registered for the Imagine Cup. Visit the Imagine Cup US rules page and scroll down to MICROSOFT IMAGINE CUP "KINECT" SWEEPSTAKES for the details. And if you are a student sign up and put a team together.

I see that the people at iRobot are running a 20 in 20 robotics roadshow in Massachusetts. I’ve talked to several people at iRobot and they are serious about building interest among students in STEM fields. See their SPARK Starter Programs for the Advancement of Robotics Knowledge web site for more information about what they are doing for education.

Are you interested in teaching functional programming? Microsoft is offering their first F# in Education Workshop (Cambridge MA 5 Nov 201) and Don Syme (principal person behind F#) talks about the F# in Education workshop on his blog.

The Microsoft Office team announced the the Office.com 2011 calendar template contest which started last week see Office blog or the Calendar Template Contest Home Page for more details.

I found a post I really liked on the Blog@CACM blog last week - Old Geeks Never Die, They Just Get Grumpier I found this post to express a lot of how I feel about programming language wars and a lot of other sometimes heated discussions in computer science. Am I getting older? For sure. Grumpier? Maybe.

Charlie Kindel (on Twitter @ckindel) from the Windows Phone 7 system Tweeted “Remember Tetris for Windows (1991?!?)? DaveE wrote it. He also wrote this "Using the Accelerometer on Windows Phone 7"

Also related to Windows Phone 7 @MSTechStudent Tweeted about an essential guide for developers moving to Windows Phone 7 and C# from the Objective-C or Java languages and this XNA Framework 4.0 training kit.

Lastly my friend Peter Vogel  @PeterVogel pointed out this good post on the CSTA blog CS Lessons From Facebook. If you are going to use case studies (and I’m a fan) you might as well use case studies that students can relate to. Facebook qualifies.