CS & IT Conference Day 1 - 2011
This year CSTA is trying a bunch of new things with the CS & IT Conference. First off we added a workshop day on the front end. So yesterday there were a number of three hour workshops. You can see what was offered on the CS & IT agenda. I sat in on Video Game Programming with Microsoft XNA Game Studio: Serious Fun, Serious Computer Science with Pat Yongpradit and Teaching Introduction to Programming Using the Intentional Method with Lynn Langit & Llewellyn Falco.
In this picture Pat is presenting to the group of computer science educators. It was a hands on and interactive workshop. I learned some things myself. Pat always does a great job though. He calls teaching his dream job and it shows every time he presents.
Pat uses XNA and C# to teach game development. He runs a very successful program with many of his students creating competitive games for the Imagine Cup competition. His students do well competing with college students. You can get Pat’s materials from his website’s downloads page. Just look for CS&IT Symposium Downloads.
Lynn and Llewellyn are presenting in the picture below. They taught the group their pedagogy which they call “the Intention Method”. They use Small Basic as the programming platform. It seems to work really well.
Lynn and Llewellyn have all their material at a site called TKP – Teaching Kids Programming.
The TEACHERS resource section of the TKP site is organized as follows:
General Topics for teachers on this site include the following:
- what we teach (i.e. which languages, software, IDEs, etc..),
- where we teach (i.e. links to events),
- who teaches (list of trained TKP teachers by location)
- how to teach the using the Intention Method (i.e. list of general teaching tips for all of our courseware)
All in all day one was a great success. This is the first time for a workshop day but anything that didn’t go smoothly was pretty much transparent to the attendees. I can’t wait for the sessions today!