Thoughts on the Edublogger Awards
Earlier in the week I received an email telling me that nomination for this year’s Edublogger Awards are now open. Some really great blogs are nominated every year. Last year this blog was nominated which I thought was really great. I didn’t win which was not as great but honestly I can’t say that I am surprised nor that I felt like I deserved to win. The thing is that these awards are really designed for more general education blogs. What I am trying to do here is to create the very best blog resource that I can for high school computer science teachers. It’s a bit of a niche audience. And while others read and I hope benefit from what I w

What does it look like?
Every so often someone suggests a project and I ask myself “why wasn’t I clever enough to think of that?” Actually it happen more often than I would probably like to admit. There are a lot of really good out of the box thinkers in education. The other day was just such an example. And I learned about it on Twitter with reinforces to me the value of Twitter for learning. Chris Champion (blog Twitter @ChrisChampion) Twittered “Asking students 2 find images to describe programming terms.” What a great idea. The stu

Interesting Links 23 November 2009
Ever wonder how they get the sound effects for car racing video games? A Tesla gets recorded for Microsoft games. Interesting story really. Hacking and ethics I was really hoping more people would leave comments and opinions on that post.Especially after a former student of mine left a strongly dissenting view. Is he right? What do you or your students think? I saw this first on a Tweet from @Microsoft: “Make learning fun: Game Design Challenge -- build mini-games on XNA Game Studio 3.

Creating Games with XNA® Game Studio and C#
New High School Computer Science Course Creating Games with XNA® Game Studio and C#

Hacking and Ethics
I get a lot of interesting email. Today I received an email from a student in Japan asking me the question “Do you think that hackers will decrease if we improve Information-ethics-education?” My first thought was yes. My second thought was no. My third thought was maybe. Helpful answers? Perhaps not but it is a complex question. By hacking I assume, based on context, that me means the breaking into systems sort of hacking rather than the old-fashioned “trying all sorts of things to see what one can learn sort of hacking” that was the more common meaning in “the old days.” And of course many of the people breaking into systems even today claim no malicious in