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Just found out about this. Comes with an interesting HTML5-based interface:

Mike Zamansky is a very experienced and highly-regarded computer science teacher in New York, and founder (I think?) of the upcoming New York City Academy of Software Engineering (here’s Joel Spolsky on the topic). Imagine, then, my delight at discovering that he’d recently started blogging again.

I love his latest post on teaching:

I’ve been thinking a lot about my career as a teacher recently. I decided to leave industry over twenty years ago. As teachers, particularly teachers with technical backgrounds we leave a financially lucrative field to enter one with very few financial rewards. It’s also a field very much under attack, particularly in recent years. [...]

So, what do I get out of the deal? Well, when I hear form my graduates, I know that I’ve made a difference. Also, the friendships I’ve developed over the years.

His other pieces are great, too — thoughts (with starter code!) on a software engineering class project that teaches design through implementation, some reflections and suggestions on the Stanford profs’ CS classes, and some details of a lesson module he developed to teach 2-D arrays (again, with code). Fantastic.

If, in the 1980s, you were blowing on NES game cartridges to try and get them to load, you must play this free Flash game. It’s a loving tribute to video games of the era, with faithful–albeit, on occasion, hilariously wrong–re-creations of gameplay and characters from Double Dragon, Mario, Contra, Zelda and more:

I’m stuck on the Zelda level, but I’ve actually been re-playing it so I can finish the game and try out all the different levels. Me! Wanting to finish a game! This is new ground, people.

(Thanks Brandon for the alert on the game.)

I was playing around with multi-site-specific browser Raven, and I wanted to use Instapaper Article Tools for Instapaper, like I did on Safari and Chrome. However, Raven doesn’t support Safari extensions, so I had to use the user script version. Unfortunately, that’s based on an old version of the Instapaper website, so it didn’t work as expected. Anyway, long story short (well, still unnecessarily long), I did up a quick fix for the script:

Download it here.

This should work with Raven, Fluid and Firefox with Greasemonkey.

(I sent a copy to the author a couple of days ago, but I thought there’s no harm posting this here too.)

One gentleman named Burton Durand took it upon himself to translate spambot/comedy-genius Twitter account horse_ebooks into comic form.

For example:

SO GREAT.

horse_ebooks has become one of my most frequently-faved Twitter accounts, and this comic adds greatly to the overall sense of mirth and bewilderment. I recommend reading The Ballad of @Horse_ebooks for some background on the account and how it rose to Internet stardom.

A follow-up piece to the previous link, which argues for digital literacy over coding skills:

Digital literacy means the the skills and confidence to take an active role in engaging in networks, and in shaping and creating opportunities – social, political, cultural, civic, and economic, and we shouldn’t be collapsing these broader rights into the relatively narrow concerns of computing science as a curriculum area.

Article via Fraser Speirs. Mildly surprising, to me at least, is his strong support for the argument raised in the link article, given that he’s a programmer and Computer Science teacher. This piece of his on “technology for subjects not traditionally well-served by technology” may serve to explain why, but I’m still trying to digest all of this.

From September, England’s schools will offer computer science classes instead of ICT (a.k.a. IT ‘skills’ such as PowerPoint and Excel):

The current programme of information and communications technology (ICT) study in England’s schools will be scrapped from September, the education secretary will announce later.

The subject will be replaced by compulsory lessons in more rigorous computer science and programming.

Not sure how they’ll start this up so quickly, given this glaring problem:

“There are, of course, significant challenges to overcome, specifically with the immediate shortage of computer science teachers.”

See also this Guardian article: “Out of 28,000 teachers who qualified in 2010, just three individuals had a computer-related degree.” Similarly the case here, although the return of A-level Computing should imply that NIE will be doing something about training CS teachers.

I’m still on the fence about whether CS absolutely needs to be taught at a pre-tertiary level. There was some interesting discussion on this recently between a couple of Mac developers — see this blog post by Guy English on “Scripting is the New Literacy”, a response to this piece by Daniel Jalkut encouraging everyone to “Learn to Code”.

(News via Matt Johnston.)

My favourite new lorem ipsum generator. This setting emulates the writing style of The Verge:

If you want an Android phone, this might just be your best bet, for this reason suits your needs so we would recommend this phone if you wanted this sort of thing nevertheless possibly, so as to it can’t hold a candle when is might be better than the iPhone, once only time will tell if it will be successful.

Just pips the iPhone at the post, soon battery life isn’t great but not too bad either, whatever could be the best Android phone, overall better than most of its competitors as soon as just about the best in the main depends.

This, together with image placeholder generator PlaceKitten, makes you all set for some client-confusing design greatness.

Hilarious piece. What a great kid, and a great couple of seasons.

Via multiple sources:

This event will focus on iTunes University and Apple in education.

This is the most excited I’ve been about an Apple event since the iPhone.