I just learned that I was awarded a patent for work that I did as part of a team at Mindjet creating “smart map parts”. I look back very proudly at my four years at Mindjet in software development and business development, working with visionaries like Mike Jetter and Chris Holmes . The concrete...
Today I have made up a new word – please use it freely: allusophoria noun the sense of delight experienced on discovering the origin of a literary allusion. Usage in a sentence “Alex felt allusophoria and laughed when he realized that Nemo in Finding Nemo was named after the fictional character Captain...
Friday was the last day of the Fairfax Computer Camp , an informal camp that I led in my house for my 9-year-old son Alex and nine of his friends and I would say that is was an absolute success. By the end of the week all of the campers were adept at Kodu and knew how to make computer games...
On the fourth day of the Fairfax Computer camp the campers were busy building, refining, and testing the games that they were creating with Kodu . Almost all of the kids tried some of the sample games and started tinkering with them by changing the rules, the programming, the worlds. When...
On our third day of the Fairfax Computer Camp, we started out Small Basic for a second day and I immediately noticed that the enthusiasm had waned a bit. I was also noticing that Small Basic was still a bit advanced for these incoming 4th graders who were all still learning their way around the...
As you may have read about earlier in the week, I am hosting a computer camp in my home this week, teaching Kodu and Small Basic programming to my 9-year old son Alex and nine of his friends. Today we moved on from a first day of Kodu game programming to learning the basics of writing code with...
On the First day of the Fairfax Computer Camp , a introduction to computer programming camp I’m running out of my home for a week, we started these 9-year-olds off with Kodu . After setting up all of the computers that the kids brought in and hooking up a projector, I proceeded to start teaching...
My son Alex, age 9, wants to learn about computer programming so I decided to try something fun – to teach it to him. In my day job, I explain and demonstrate Microsoft’s software development technologies and I’ve been programming since I was about ten so I think I know what to do. I wanted...
Since a young age I was always good with computers. I spent many years of my adolescence tinkering on a personal computer: first TRS-80 s at school, and then an IBM PCjr at home. It was a logical progression from building cities with Lego blocks to building programs in BASIC on a computer. At the time...
I am considering create a book of images from my journals that I’ve kept over the years. I am looking at the option of self-publishing and on-demand printing. Has anyone had success with this?
