Interesting Links 28 March 2011
I didn’t travel away from home all last week. It was great to catch up on a lot of things but as always work comes in to fill up anything even remotely like free time. Still I had a chance to pick up some good links. I hope you will find something useful here.
Know any hi tech high school students in the Boston/Cambridge MA area? Microsoft New England (@MSNewEngland) is now recruiting for the NERD High School Summer Internship Program. Deadline is 4/8 so act now!
Do you know any students between the ages of 9 and 17 who think of themselves as game designers? Make sure they know about the Microsoft Kodu Cup - Game design competition. (US only right now Sorry) PC Magazine has an article on Kodu you may find interesting as well - In search of a programming language to teach children basic coding
One of the wonderful things about blogs by teachers is that they share some great ideas. In this post Impact of Childhood Games Hélène Martin talks about a weekly discussion group she holds with the girls at her school and shares some of the things she is learning from the experience. This is great on several levels and is an idea that is readily replicable.
Speaking of teachers doing good things, this article about Pat Yongpradit and his students, talks about some of what he is doing with his high school programming students. Pioneering teacher wants virtual worlds to lead to real careers for students
From some of my friends at Microsoft in Europe (@MSEurope) comes this interesting story of Xbox & Kinect helping to rehabilitate children with cancer in Poland. Games are more than just fun and technology for one purpose can often lead to new and unexpected uses.
Enforcement Unicorn Ninja - possibly the best job title at Microsoft. There are all sorts of interesting jobs in technology companies and few students even suspect that many of them exist. This particular job involves online community moderation.
Judging by the traffic my post on How Does Kinect Work continues to get there is a lot of interest in this device. Recently Microsoft Research revealed more of the guts of Kinect technology. An officially supported software development kit is in the works. Sometime this spring it will be out. You’ll read about it here when that happens of course.
My manager, Bob Familiar (@bobfamiliar) sent me a link to an article about Tara Walker Recruiting HBCUs to Join Technology Competition. Tara has been doing a great job working with a number of Historically Black Colleges and Universities to encourage students there to participate in the Imagine Cup. Some great learning goes into working on these projects. Tara writes about her work on Imagine Cup Attracts Student Innovators from Historically Black Colleges for the First Time on the Microsoft Blog.
The US Imagine Cup People’s Choice Awards are now open for voting - vote early and often!
On Twitter @CSFtweets sent out a link to some great stories about women engineers and scientists working at NASA. Well worth the read.
Join the FREE Microsoft Partners in Learning Network and you could win a trip to ISTE 2011 in Philadelphia!