Posts from SIGCSE: bring on Alice 3

March 15, 2008

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Wanda Dann, Dennis Cosgrove and co are hosting several hundred academics at the Alice tea-party today. We’ve used Alice for several years now in our introductory programming courses. Dale and Patricia have carefully measured learning outcomes (pdf). They, along with others, have found that students can get distracted by the building of characters (joining legs […]

Posts from SIGCSE: Marissa Mayer’s 9 lessons from Google

March 15, 2008

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Marissa Mayer is giving the keynote at SIGCSE. In her talk “Innovation, design and simplicity”, she’s talking about 9 lessons from Google. She’s given this talk before (Stanford podcasts)  but the insights for computer science education and the Q&A are new. Here’s my notes: 1. Creativity loves constraint Sometimes best ideas come from constraint. Eg […]

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Posts from SIGCSE: Humanitarian FOSS project

March 14, 2008

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Ralph Morelli from Trinity College is leading a workshop at SIGCSE called “Teaching and Building Humanitarian Open Source Software” (with others including Heidi Elias and Janardham Iyengar).   This is an exciting move towards computing for sustainability. Humanitarian-FOSS is software that benefits humanity in some way. They use the word humanitarian in the broadest sense, so […]

LivingCampus Forum

March 5, 2008

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We’ve got a LivingCampus forum on Friday lunchtime. At this meeting we’re talking about what we’ve done so far and introducing a strategy to progress the design and implementation. The key to this process is working groups to contribute to the design of each themed area to develop a plan that meets each of the […]

LivingCampus Update

March 5, 2008

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The LivingCampus got off to a great start with a prominent article by Brenda Harwood in the Star. Phil Ker endorsed the project, as did student representatives Meagan Cloughley and Ryan Ward. Leigh has been writing about the project too: We’re aiming to be developing sustainable production systems and living/working spaces with community education value. […]