Thursday, December 25, 2008

Merry Christmas!

Here's wishing everyone a wonderful holiday. I hope you got some great computers, free OSes, preinstalled software development packages, and clean compiles with no errors and no warnings worth mentioning.

While you're preparing for the new year, you're going to need a way to keep track of the date. You could do a lot worse than to pick up a Traveller calendar. It's got great science fiction art contributed by amateurs. Not that you can tell by the quality of the art. I've seen worse--far worse--in many professional publications. I've got one hanging next to me here at my post, I'm looking at the ship Azhanti High Lightning by Andrew Boulton now.

It's been a great holiday for us, and it's not even over yet.

The last couple of classes I had my Middle School computer class playing a MUD in the classroom. We had a good time, and the kids didn't even realize they were getting educated in the process.

My high school class was finishing up their proposals for video games, it looks like we're going to have some great ideas to work with. Even some of the really simple game ideas have some interesting twists to them. When school starts up again they'll be giving their presentations (assuming they still remember what they were doing ;) and we'll be selecting the games we'll be developing once we get through some Greenfoot tutorials and some Java basics. But the high schoolers found out the middle schoolers have been playing the MUD, so I've promised them a few classes of MUD before we start programming. After we've done some Greenfoot, though, I wonder if they'll regret it. :)