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Alfred Thompson's blog about teaching computer science at the K-12 level. Alfred was a high school computer science teacher for 8 years. He has also taught grades K-8 as a computer specialist.
Shouldn't Learning Be Fun?
At this morning's NECC keynote discussion Elizabeth Streb noted that students who come to her...
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 06/26/2007
Computer Science Unplugged: CS Activities For K–12 Beyond Programming
I'm sitting in 'Computer Science Unplugged: CS Activities For K–12 Beyond Programming' a session at...
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 06/25/2007
CSTA Wants to Hear Your Story
Chris Stephenson of CSTA told us (those of us at the SIGCT breakfast) about a new effort to collect...
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 06/25/2007
The First Thing Is To Get Them Interested
I am sitting in the SIGCT Breakfast Forum at NECC this morning. The discussion is pretty interesting...
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 06/25/2007
EduBloggerCon
Most of the entries in the Education section of my RSS aggregator today are about EduBloggerCon....
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 06/24/2007
Programming Proverbs 21: Hand-check the program before running it
Hand checking code seems to be a dying art. At least for students that is. Throw some code into the...
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 06/22/2007
Physics Of Game Development
One of the things that seems to be a bit of an eye opening experience for many students is that...
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 06/21/2007
Windows SteadyState replaces Shared Computer Toolkit
How does Blake Handler always see these announcements before I do? The man is amazing. Good thing I...
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 06/20/2007
Send In The Robots
Over at the Microsoft Robotics Studio Blog Joseph Fernando has a couple of interesting posts. The...
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 06/19/2007
Ancient Rome - The Computer Generated Tour
A major project called Rome Reborn is a virtual tour of ancient Rome. According to this article an...
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 06/18/2007
Programming Proverbs 20: Provide good documentation
Well what in the world is good documentation? Now there is a question for the ages. Lots of...
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 06/15/2007
Math Moves U - And a Mission to Mars
I recently found out about MathMovesU as web site devoted to mathematics. Specifically someone told...
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 06/14/2007
Programming Proverbs 19: Prettyprint
While compilers generally don't care about how code looks as long as it follows the rules on syntax....
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 06/08/2007
Programmer Personality Test
I found this Programmer Personality test the other day. It is based of the Myers-Briggs Personality...
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 06/07/2007
Microsoft Web Experience events in LA & Denver
Looks like there are still open seats for these training events in Los Angeles and Denver. These...
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 06/06/2007
We are not here to entertain, but to teach.
Lately there has been a lot of discussion in the world of computer science education about mays to...
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 06/05/2007
Bill Gates and Steve Jobs Joint Interview
Many of you have probably heard about Bill Gates and Steve Jobs joint interview at the Wall Street...
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 06/04/2007
What do teachers make?
Some people, especially non-teachers, may find this video a bit "rabid" (as one friend of mine...
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 06/02/2007
The Prime Number Syndrome
Tucker Balch, a computing professor at Georgia Tech, blames the decline in computer science students...
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 06/01/2007
Educational Uses for Microsoft Surface
You know every so often someone writes a simple blog post that when you read it makes you want to...
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 05/31/2007
Changing the Way We Think About Input Output
The first computer I ever programmed was the IBM 1130 and initially input meant using a card reader....
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 05/30/2007
Parent's Guide to Windows Vista
Most new PCs these days are coming with Windows Vista on them. If you are a parent, especially if...
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 05/30/2007
Programming Proverbs 18: Use Comments
Is there anything so obvious to an experienced programmer that is so hard to get across to students...
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 05/25/2007
PopFly Invitations
I have two invitations to the PopFly alpha available. I want to give them to a K-12 teacher or...
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 05/23/2007
Does Personality Matter?
I read a very interesting article in a recent edition of the Communications of the ACM entitled...
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 05/22/2007
Irrelevant Programming Languages
Mark Hendrickson from O'Reilly has an interesting review of the market for computer books in a four...
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 05/21/2007
Are you tracking all the new things in web development?
I created a couple of web pages today. I fired up Notepad and started entering raw HTML...
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 05/18/2007
Programming Proverbs 17: Never assume the computer assumes anything
The computer doesn't know what you mean, it only knows what you tell it. How often do we tell people...
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 05/18/2007
Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing 2007
Over at Diane Curtis' blog I read about the upcoming Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing...
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 05/17/2007
Lost in Translation in the move to Office 2007
Personally I love Office 2007 and have had enough time to make the transition to the new user...
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 05/16/2007
XNA In The Classroom
There really aren't a lot of books on XNA available yet (though some are coming) and real textbooks...
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 05/15/2007
Health Care and Computers
One of the things I talk about over and over again is how ubiquitous computers are becoming. There...
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 05/14/2007
Programming Proverbs 16: Build in debugging techniques
When ever programming teachers get together one of the debates that often starts up is between using...
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 05/11/2007
InstaCalc
Kalid Azad sent me an email about his online calculator site called InstaCalc and it is really...
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 05/10/2007
Fun and Educational Posts on the Visual Basic Team Blog
The Visual Basic team blog has had quite a run of great posts lately. The topics have been very...
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 05/09/2007
Workshop on the Impact of Pen-based Technology on Education
WIPTE (Workshop on the Impact of Pen-based Technology in Education) is coming up next month and it...
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 05/08/2007
Is anyone teaching security in school?
Operating system security is a mystery to me in some regards. While there was a time when I thought...
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 05/07/2007
C# From a Java Perspective
I see that Dare Obasanjo has updated his wonderful article on C# From A Java Developer's...
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 05/04/2007
FREE Microsoft Certification exam (North American Students and Faculty Only)
My friend and co-worker Philip alerted me to this great deal for faculty and students. Note that is...
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 05/03/2007
More on teaching kids to think - AKA CS concepts for looking things up
I talked about the need to teach thinking skills the other day. Yesterday I read Steve Dembo talking...
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 05/03/2007
Computer science, business grads snag highest average salaries
The CSTA Blog reproduced an article from The Daily Tar Heel, the student newspaper at the University...
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 05/02/2007
Variables Late or Variables Early?
One of the shining stars of teaching computer science in recent years is the Alice environment....
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 05/01/2007
24th Annual Connecticut Invention Convention
This past Saturday I attended the 24th Annual Connecticut Invention Convention at the University of...
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 04/30/2007
Girls and Robots
I came across an article on all-girl teams in the FIRST Robotics competition thanks to an email from...
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 04/27/2007