Interesting Links 8 August 2011

I’m home for a while now. A month anyway. I’ve made 6 trips in the last 6 weeks and only one of them for vacation. So it will be nice to be home for a while. Maybe I can get some code written – Kinect and Windows Phone are on my agenda. I’ll blog about any interesting code I write so stay tuned for that. For today is is time for my Monday wrap up of interesting links from the previous week. I have more than usual today so please read though them all.  Hope you find something of value here. I’m starting off with some great work by some of my favorite teachers.

Hélène Martin had a great review of the keynote speakers from last month’s CS & IT Conference at The pundit and the practitioner (CS/IT 2011 keynotes). Honestly she captured a lot of my feelings but expressed them much better than I could have. That sort of thoughtful post is one reason I subscribe to her blog.

Pat Yongpradit, yet another inspiring teacher,  (twitter @MrYongpradit) has been active lately as well. First off an interview with Jane McGonigal (@avantgame), world-renown game designer/researcher in which Pat asks about Gameful Education. It’s a great interview and it inspired Pat to write a post called "Gameful Education: Playing School as a Game" To finish off Pat’s trifecta is an article at the Huffington Post called Innovative Educators, Innovative Relationships - What goes unnoticed often matters most!

Garth Flint had a great post this week as well. He talks about Why schools should offer CS and other notes

The people at HP Code Wars, probably the largest high school programming competition in Texas, (twitter @HPCodeWars) posted a link to  Even engineers and tech types still need "soft skills" from the Houston Chronicle. A lot of students in STEM fields don’t realize how important soft skills are which makes this a valuable article.

Interested in security? Think you are good at it? If so you may be interested in this from Microsoft - Microsoft Kicks Off $250,000 Security Contest 

Are you using C++? If so you will want to visit the C++ Development Center - A whole center dedicated to Visual C++ Development Tutorials - for free!

One of the great opportunities for students involved with this year’s Worldwide Imagine Cup was a panel discussion on entrepreneurship with some leaders in the field. You can read about it at  Entrepreneurship 101: VC Panel Tells Entrepreneurs What it Takes on the Microsoft Tech Student blog.

Ray Fleming lists a pile of Microsoft technical e-books now free for Kindle and iPad. These books were already available in other soft copy formats but if you use Kindles or iPads you may find this particularly useful.

One of the big “news” stories recently was a report of a survey that alleged that users if various web browsers were used by people of different intelligences. It turns out though that the Internet Explorer IQ Story Was A Hoax A great lesson here is checking your sources before accepting reports as true.

Have you been making plans to use the Kinect SDK? If  so check out the  Kinect for Windows SDK beta 1 refresh - Get the latest updates to the Kinect for Windows SDK beta.

Here is a different sort of story. We read all sorts of stories about students leaving college early to play football professionally. Here is a story of a college football player who left football early to take a job in industry. Tech's Albert Rocker leaves early for Microsoft Welcome to Microsoft Albert!

Windows Phone Student App of the Week: Cookie Monsters  First of a new blog series by one of our high school interns

Comments

• Anonymous
  August 08, 2011
  Interesting Links 8 August 2011-interesting, nice sharing.