My youngest son’s teacher found out I work at MS, so now he expects me to come into his class to teach them cool stuff. I’m happy to do that, but now I’m worried about putting together a cool 1-4 hours of stuff to do, e.g.
Cool PowerPoint stuff (wowing their classmates)
Cool Excel stuff (doing their math homework)
Cool Web stuff (building their own web site)
Cool Programming stuff (writing their own PC/XBox 360 games)
Cool Hardware stuff (programming a robot)
Obviously, I’m not the first person to want to teach kids how to do cool stuff w/ their computers. Can someone point me at some activities for a classroom for of kids to do in these (or other) categories? Thanks!
P.S. My son is a 6th grader, making his class 11 and 12 year olds.
I don’t want to download movies via Vongo or Amazon Unbox to my PC; I want to download them to my TV and smart phone! YouTube works because the videos are short, so watching them on my PV happens right now or not at all. Any movie or TV show service that doesn’t let me play the result on my media center or take it with me on my phone, I just don’t care. Does anyone want to watch 30+ minutes of video sitting at their desk or staring at their lap? I don’t get it…
In the world of Windows technical writing which has so much competition, there’s rarely any money involved, one dreams for reviews like these from KarstenJ:
″Tim Sneath walked into my office the other day and laid Charles Petzold’s Applications = Code + Markup on my desk. I’m only to Chapter 7 of 31 chapters and I am riveted. I already have that feeling when reading a great novel when you don’t want it to end. It actually does read like a novel to me, with a narrative arch as it negotiates its methodical way through the WPF jungle of APIs.”
I installed the “almost” RC1 of Vista onto my $366 PC and I’ve finally got sound! In addition, I’ve got the real transparent Aero effects and playback of my .msdvr files (Media Center recorded TV shows) over the network. The “experience” scores out at only 2.9, but only ’cuz of my crappy CPU (1.67 GHz) and the video card (although it does real-time video and Aero — what more should it do?!?). The DVD video playback worked but not the audio, which was one of very few glitches (another was that it doesn’t show video on Google videos).
I’m running Vista Ultimate, and while I can’t tell what’s “ultimate” about it, it feels about time to make Vista the OS on my main computer. Certainly my sons like it on their computer, which is the real test.
