Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information from Alfred Thompson
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.
Time To Mine the Data
Or is it “mind” the data? Last week I read a blog post by Stacey Armstrong (CS News...
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 08/31/2010
Interesting Posts 30 August 2010
One of the things I tell people when they ask me about why I came to work for Microsoft is that the...
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 08/30/2010
Error Messages and Providing Information
The most interesting error message I ever saw read something like “Unexpected error – installation...
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 08/25/2010
Getting Started with Windows Phone 7 Game Development
Announcing the first part of a series of educational resources for learning to create games for...
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 08/24/2010
Interesting Links Post 23 August 2010
Happy Monday! Are you back to school yet? A lot of teachers are. If you are back I hope it is going...
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 08/23/2010
Shortening the Time To Fun
Recently my friend and co-worker Dan Waters was giving a presentation about XNA Game Studio as a...
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 08/20/2010
Girls, Games and Software Development
Girls play games – computer games, video games, console games, online games – all kinds...
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 08/19/2010
Free Microsoft Office Add-ins for Educators
Just in time to start off the new school year, several new supporting tools are now updated for...
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 08/17/2010
Interesting Links 16 August 2010
I was on vacation last week. I could not seem to stay away from the Internet and from blogging...
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 08/16/2010
Non-Myths About Programming
Mark Guzdial attended the first day of the ICER 2010 conference in Denmark this week. He blogged...
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 08/13/2010
Windows Phone 7 Sample applications
Windows Phone 7 Program Manager, Sean Mckenna, visited the Channel 9 studio to demo of some Windows...
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 08/11/2010
Bytes by MSDN and TechNet
Microsoft has just started a new series of blogs that will highlight various developers and IT...
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 08/11/2010
Silverlight 4 XNA Platformer Level Editor for Windows Phone 7
Interesting in developing games for the Windows Phone 7? David Rousset has just finished a complete...
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 08/06/2010
10 Most Popular Posts June and July 2010
It’s early August and while many teachers will not be returning to their classrooms for a couple of...
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 08/05/2010
What do you want in a Textbook
I’ve been thinking a lot about textbooks lately. Do students really read/use them? What is the...
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 08/04/2010
Interesting Links August 3 2010
You may have noticed that I wasn’t blogging much last week. Or maybe you didn’t notice but allow me...
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 08/03/2010
Fixing the Computer Science Problem with an Act of Congress
Bills get written and submitted to Congress without getting passed all the time but if nothing else...
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 08/02/2010
EdChat Education Discussions on Twitter
Have you ever wondered what good Twitter was for educators? Well #EdChat is one thing that is very...
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 07/27/2010
Interesting Links July 26 2010
I sure have been traveling a lot lately. I spent the early part of last week at Stevens Institute of...
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 07/26/2010
Teaching to the Test
OK let me be clear upfront that I am not a big fan of the current Advanced Placement Computer...
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 07/23/2010
Over-Educated, Yet Under-Qualified?
You’ve heard it said many time that “No one who takes a high school programming course...
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 07/22/2010
Interesting Links July 19th 2010
I spent some time in California at the CSTA CS & IT Symposium last week. Great stuff to learn...
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 07/19/2010
Little Orphan Computer Science
The never ending debate over where Computer Science fits in the curriculum continues. Mark Guzdial...
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 07/16/2010
Advice For An Imagine Cup Team
The following is a guest post by Pat Yongpradit. Pat is the computer science teacher at Springbrook...
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 07/14/2010
Microsoft Research Illuminates Mars in 3-D With WorldWide Telescope
Cool stuff for us space nuts. It’s a database project with a difference. Microsoft Research has...
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 07/13/2010
Interesting Links 12 July 2010
I’m up early this morning to take a flight out to California. I’ll be presenting at the annual CSTA...
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 07/12/2010
Microsoft Technology Associate (MTA) Certifications
This week Microsoft announced a new set of entry level certifications that may be of interest to...
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 07/09/2010
Visual Programming Languages
There seem to be a growing number of visual programming languages available these days. Kodu (below)...
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 07/07/2010
Interesting Links July 5 2010
Did you have a good Fourth of July weekend? Technically a holiday for me today as the real day come...
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 07/05/2010
Career Outlook for CS Students
The CACM web site has an interesting interview with Joel Adams (Joel Adams Discusses the Career...
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 07/01/2010
Conversations at ISTE
Yesterday was more or less the opening of ISTE. These conference are sort of interesting in that...
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 06/28/2010
Interesting Links 27 June 2010
Posting early this week as I hope to have more timely stuff to write about as the week goes on. I’m...
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 06/27/2010
Kodu Game Lab - Classroom Kit
The Kodu team has just released a classroom kit of Kodu resources. If you are thinking about using...
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 06/25/2010
Getting Close to ISTE Time
I am starting to put stuff together to take with me to ISTE this weekend. I get in Sunday sometime...
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 06/24/2010
How Many Types of Programmers are there?
Paul Vick wrote a post called “There are only three types of programmers in the...
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 06/22/2010
Multiple Paths into Computer Science
This started out as a comment on Mark Guzdial’s blog post titled “Skip college to study computing?”...
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 06/22/2010
Interesting Links 21 June 2010
By rough count I went through 160 Tweets to cull out the interesting links for today’s post....
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 06/21/2010
Critical Thinking
Friday is not the day to talk about thinking. I think a lot of people in general and students in...
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 06/18/2010
A Show About Computer Programming
One of the things that comes up in conversation when ever getting more students, especially women,...
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 06/16/2010
Teaching Real Projects Workshop
I’ll be helping out with some of this workshop at Stevens Institute of Technology in July. Free...
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 06/15/2010
Interesting Links 14 June 2010
Is school done for the year where you are? Here in the northeast of the US there is another week or...
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 06/14/2010
Projects That Mean Something
Very often is seems as though teacher tend to assign projects that mean little if anything to any...
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 06/09/2010
Inspiration – It’s what teachers do
Earlier this week Microsoft announced the winners of the 2010 Windows Phone 7 "Rockstar"...
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 06/08/2010
Interesting Links 7 June 2010
I tried to take most of last week off. Well I guess I actually did officially take most of the week...
Author: Alfred Thompson Date: 06/07/2010