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Are you teaching Advanced Placement Computer Science? Are you looking for supplemental exercises that may help you students with the concepts? If so this announcement may be of interest to you. Pex for Fun has been around for a while offering coding duels in C#, F# and Visual Basic. Recently though it was decided to invest some time, money and effort to adapt some exercises specifically to help learn APCS concepts. Most students find the differences between Java and C# pretty minor at this level so most APCS students will find this doable even if they have only been taught Java previously.

As children are surrounded by technology more than ever, the way computers are taught will need to change. This was reflected in a recent government announcement by Michael Gove around reforming and updating the computer science curriculum.

.NET Gadgeteer can be used in schools to help students make gadgets and learn C# programming along the way. These lesson plans give teachers all the material needed to run 8 1-hour sessions using .NET Gadgeteer. You will also need the hardware, details of which are given at http://netmf.com/gadgeteer.

Throughout the year I try to share resources and information with you that I think will be helpful for you. Often times these resources will include links to free eBooks that we make available on a variety of topics. Today, I thought I would post a large collection of eBooks for you here so that you can find them in one place and consume them as you see fit. Also, if you find this list helpful, please share it with your peers and colleagues so that they too can benefit from these resources.

"We don't teach students how to read code. Actually we don't event teach them that they should read code for the most part."

U.S. Senator Bob Casey (D-PA) and Congressman Jared Polis (D-CO) today introduced the Computer Science Education Act, which will help prepare Americans for the more than 1.5 million high-wage computing jobs that are expected to be created in the U.S. by 2018. The bill will help states to increase and strengthen their computer science offerings in K-12 education.

Last week Doug Peterson pointed me to an article called "Let's not call it computer science if we really mean computer programming." My initial reaction was "Let's not call it computer programming if we really mean software engineering."  Really the author was talking more about the difference between CS and SE than much else.The ACM has a great Computing Careers web site which lists a number of computing fields and degrees. I recommend this series to teachers and guidance councilors all the time. They list five different degree paths:

Last week Doug Peterson pointed me to an article called "Let's not call it computer science if we really mean computer programming." My initial reaction was "Let's not call it computer programming if we really mean software engineering."  Really the author was talking more about the difference between CS and SE than much else.The ACM has a great Computing Careers web site which lists a number of computing fields and degrees. I recommend this series to teachers and guidance councilors all the time. They list five different degree paths:

Imagine Cup-Solving the Worlds Problems Through Software

I'd always tell these people the same thing -- if it is only five lines of code then go write your own ActiveX object! Because yes, you are absolutely right -- it would take me approximately five minutes to add that feature to the VBScript runtime library. But how many Microsoft employees does it actually take to change a lightbulb?

Non-Myths About Programming

Ever since I was told about a list of Movies for Computer Science Students and wrote some comments about that list I have been thinking book. Fiction books. Novels that tell stories that involve computer science and the sorts of issues of privacy, philosophy, ethics and social change that computers make in our society.

This documentation and accompanying sample application will get you started building a complete application that targets Windows Phone OS 7.1. You will learn the basics of Silverlight and Windows Phone development by creating a simple fuel-tracking application for your car.