Wednesday, November 16, 2011

The (STEM) Game's Afoot

The Second Annual National Stem Video Game Challenge opened yesterday and closes 3/12. (perfect for RIT students on a winter quarter schedule)

Students from middle school-grad school can enter, as can K-12 school educators either in formal schools or in after-school/weekend youth programs  (No college profs though, shuckins)  Kids get prizes and small awards, college students and educators split 30K and 40K awards respectively.

Scratch is an approved platform FOSS people!  I also pinged them to see if straight web tech such as HTML5, CSS and the rest of the usual suspects are acceptable and they gave me the thumbs up.

Get cracking!!!!!!

Thursday, November 10, 2011

Ok, so what's half a year between friends?

I'm on sabbatical and juggling projects and traveling like mad.  In the last four weeks I was at four different conferences.  

First up was the Engineering Education Conference IEEE FIE in South Dakota where I hung out with the Teaching Open Source and Open Source Dot Com crowd and presented this paper on the Girl Scout Games for Life Workshop.  

The following week I was part of a panel at the IT Educators Conference, ACM SIGITE as part of a panel on FOSS and Computing Education.  I wrote up all the FOSS session of the day for OSDC. I hit the Audio Engineering Society's conference and was able to catch one of the Game Audio sessions there and write it up as well for Gamasutra.

Last week was Los Angeles.  Before I hit the conference I was able to squeeze in a bit of fun by going to Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer's Halloween performance monday night and touring the Paramount Film Archives with an old High School friend who runs them Tuesday morning.

Then I attended the IEEE International Games Innovation Conference to check it out as we'll be running it in Rochester next year.

Many projects running.  More about those in another post.