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This will be last blog post to this blog, as I am leaving Microsoft effective Monday, October 17.  Post-Microsoft I’ll be contracting (data projects, both production and education) and spending more time growing ‘Teaching Kids Programming’ around the world.  Two years ago someone dear to me gave me the book below, little did I know then how true it would prove… Tomorrow I go to Africa, to speak at TechEd Africa on my last day of work for Microsoft.  Wish me luck.  Follow my new...

I co-hosted the MSDN show ‘This Week in Channel 9’ with Brian Keller – enjoy! Read More...

While at fooCamp this weekend in Sebastopol, among many interesting people, I met the founders of a new site – Lanyrd.com.  They call themselves a ‘social conference directory’ and from my first try-out – I LOVE their services and site. Take a look at the Lanyrd page for the upcoming SoCalCodCamp (below) conference: They’ve got the ability to list conferences, sessions, speakers and, most importantly, in addition to the typical metadata such as conference location, agenda information, etc…Lanyrd...

We discovered a shortcut that makes teaching #TKP courseware with SmallBasic even easier.  You can put everything you need for each pair of students on a single flash drive – SmallBasic, SmallBasic Extensions, Courseware, etc… AND you can run SmallBasic itself directly from this drive.  So there’s no need to install anything on a the machine you are running on.  The machine just needs to have .NET Framework 3.5 w/SP1 or greater (Windows XP, Windows Vista or Windows 7).  Here’s...

I got this story on my blog in response to a presentation I did (on .NET Rocks ) about TKP and thought you might enjoy reading it.  Details have been obscured on request. “I heard your Podcast about Teaching Kids to Program and it was really inspiring, especially the new course work you are developing. I was impressed by Small Basic as a teaching tool. I am a developer <at a major corporation> and work as a corporate web application developer/dba. I do not teach for the very reason stated...

   AND This weekend we took 8 Local Developer volunteers (most pictured below) from So Cal to Desert Code Camp in Phoenix, Az. We taught 7 hours of hands–on content designed to introduce children (ages 5-17) to programming. This is the TKP’s most extensive effort to date at a CodeCamp.  Our courseware is found at www.teachingkidsprogramming.org .  It was a fun and productive trip – we rented a van and stayed at Llew’s parent’s house, so there was a lot of ‘geek bonding’ going...

We’ve been making short videos on how to teach the parts of each recipe.  Not all recipes are complete, but we are working on it… Each recipe consists of the following parts: 1) Recipe 2) Recap 3) Variation 4) Quiz 5) Homework We have made videos for parts 1,2 & 3 so far.  We are working on making ‘how-to-teach’ videos for the rest of the processes (i.e. ‘variation’, etc…in the near future).  How to teach SQUARE recipe How to teach SQUARE recap How to teach SQUARE quiz If you are...

Llewellyn and Bart got together to write the first pass at koans for Rx last night. We published the result on CodePlex today - here . What's a koan? It's an interactive excercise, using the lanaguage (features) and done in the editor to learn without a teacher. Kind of like directed hacking, just 'fix' each line and...learn. The most fun way to do this is with another developer - pair up, code and learn! If you like this format, you can try it out in other languages, such as C# Read...

We taught the first of our new, weekly events at the Microsoft office in Irvine, CA today.  The high school group coded up two SmallBasic recipes.  Here’s a video of how the day went. Read More...

I participated in my first CodeRetreat in PHX recently. I had way more fun than I expected to and it was a safe environment for me to learn new languages. I really liked getting to pair with skilled developers who travelled from as far away as Mexico to attend. WHAT? In a nutshell it's an 8 hour day of 45-minutes intervals of pair programming any part of Conway's Game of Life . WHY? I attended because I wanted to work in languages that were new to me. To that end, I succeeded - I coded in...

  Finally, a neat way to use Twitter Lists!  I created a ‘newspaper’ from my @llangit\WomenWhoTech list on a new site called ‘ Paper.li’ .  I am really liking the format.  You can also create your own free, customized ‘newspapers’ of groups of people you follow and/or hashtags (such as following a conference or product). Read my edition of ‘The Women Who Tech Daily News’ – here . Paperli.PaperWidget.Show({ pid: 'llangit/womenwhotech', width: 200, background: '#FB0000'...

We are working on our website for TKP ( Teaching Kids Programming ) and YOU can help!  How?  We need to take the content from all the various repositories (YouTube, SlideShare, CodePlex, our own heads, etc…) and get it into a USABLE format. We are looking for help evaluating how we did from the following groups (here’s the menus from the main site – which may change): 1) STUDENTS – are you trying to learn to program using our stuff? Can you find everything? Do you know what to do? ...

I spent last weekend at BarCamp San Diego (hereafter noted as #BCSD7 – it’s Twitter hashtag).  What’s a BarCamp , you ask?  Well, read on… What’s BarCamp? BarCamp is a community-led unConference for geeks.  It usually runs over a weekend.  Registration is required (to calculate space and food needs) but most often the cost to attend is very small, or even free.  BarCamp consists of short presentations (usually under an hour) and other activities.  For #BCSD7 sessions...