Learn to Program in 2012

January 19, 2012 — Daniel

Earlier today I was watching a video interview with Grace Hopper’s biographer, and at one point he discusses how some academics disliked Grace’s work because she involved the users in developing programming languages, and from her attempts to take programming away from the mathematicians and make it something that ‘normal’ folk could do.

This point is pretty much the central theme of Ted Nelson’s 1974 classic ‘Computer Lib‘ – with “You can and must understand computers NOW” emblazoned on the cover.

It has resonance today with the flurry of recent activity highlighting the need to drastically improve computing education in the UK – Next Gen and Royal Society reports, recent government statements, and so on.

Appropriately, CodeAcademy have declared 2012 to be the Year of the Code – the year in which everyone should try to learn and program.

Here are some good start points for complete novices:

http://codeyear.com/ – CodeAcademy’s Code Year site. This uses interactive online lessons that build your skills with JavaScript – the scripting language used in web-browsers (and some other places besides).

Even more basic, the School of Webcraft will introduce you to HTML – not a programming language as such, but the basic markup language used to create simple webpages.

One of Stanford’s free courses is CS101, and this will introduce you to some of the fundamentals of computing and will allow you to practice programming online. The course starts in February, so still time to sign up. I think this course will be using Python – another easy to learn, beginner friendly language. The course leader, Nick Parlante, also runs the CodingBat site which has a range of programming challenges that can be completed online to test your skills in either Java or Python.

There are many other free online courses on computer programming, from a wide range of institutions and available through iTunes U, YouTube or elsewhere – but what these courses offer is exercises you can complete online and the opportunity to learn alongside other learners and mentors.

Posted in Technology. Tags: . No Comments »

Call for Papers: ICEC 2012

January 12, 2012 — Daniel

The IFIP International Conference on Entertainment Computing explores the application of computational technology to entertainment. The conference brings together practitioners and researchers interested in the art and design of entertainment computing applications. ICEC welcomes submissions on the design, engineering, application and theory of entertainment technology. We solicit paper, poster and demonstration submissions, as well as proposals for tutorials and workshops. Papers will be published by Springer and archived in the SpringerLink digital library.

Download here the whole Call for Papers as PDF.

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Posted in Call for Papers, conferences, Game Development, Games Based Learning, Play, Technology. Tags: . No Comments »

Bye Bye ICT… Hello CS

January 11, 2012 — Daniel

As covered on every news site (e.g. BBC) and every blog everywhere… schools in England will be dropping ICT (Information & Communication Technology, or ‘How to use office software and send email’ as it was generally taught) and introducing Computer Science – including programming and software development – in its place. It seems that even Michael Gove can get things right sometimes.

Of course, software development (including game development) is already part of the Scottish Curriculum for Excellence – but the greater challenge comes with developing teacher skills and knowledge and getting the technology in place to support the curriculum. According the Ian Livingstone interview on Today, only 3 of 28,000 qualifying teachers in England in 2010 had Computing Science degrees (seems a dubious statistic myself, not sure what the origin of the stat is), so there will be significant need to support and develop teacher expertise. If schools are merely given the option of including programming, then relatively few may benefit from what has been announced as a very major shake-up.

I’ll leave final words to Prof Steve Furber (who as one of the creators of the BBC Computer, was responsible for the introducing many British school children to programming in schools):

“We look forward to hearing more about how the government intends to support non-specialist teachers who make up the majority of the workforce in delivering an excellent ICT education without official guidance on lesson content,”

Posted in Education, Game Development, Technology. Tags: . No Comments »

…and we’re back

January 10, 2012 — Daniel

Just updated the blog – setup multi-site blogging so that I’ll be able to host all my blogs (!) in one place, each under its own domain name. A bit of a slow process with a few hiccups along the way – but it all seems to be working now. Some images and other media will be missing from some posts, and it might be a while before I settle down again with a fixed theme and set of widgets.

Best feature of the update is probably the WordPress ‘JetPack’, which is a very feature rich plugin with lots of useful elements – including the Twitter, Facebook, Google+ buttons that now appear on posts.

Over coming days/weeks I’ll be moving the 3dgamedev.wordpress.com blog over to a new domain, and I should be creating a new blog for posting puff pieces about the Games Technology course I teach on.

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The cost of free (schools)

January 7, 2012 — Daniel

Public schools in the UK and elsewhere face many challenges including, but not limited to shortages of funding and problems with low attaining students – particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds. Faced with deep problems in public schooling there are two basic approaches that can be followed by organisations (including governments) and/or parents:

  • try to improve public schools (state schools, in UK terms)
  • do something different

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Posted in Education. Tags: , , . 2 Comments »
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