The Python Game Book is a free creative-commons licensed multilingual dokuwiki book written by Horst JENS (mostly) and friends. By registering (free) you can edit and create pages in this wiki.
The Python Game Book aims to provide interested students and teachers a broad range of material to teach themselves how to write computer games using the language Python and other free Open Source tools.
http://www.ted.com/talks/john_hunter_on_the_world_peace_game.html
A great TED talk by a great teacher. Doesn’t have anything specifically to do with computers or technology but you could use some of his methods in teaching computers and technology !
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/112111-majors-computer-science-253309.html
Elite technology schools are receiving increasing numbers of applications from students wanting to pursue a computer science degree. Admissions officers and computer science professors expect to set a record for undergraduate applications this year, surpassing marks set more than a decade ago. “Most of the U.S. economy is stagnant, but computer science grads are getting hired and at pretty good salaries,” says Carnegie Mellon University’s Mark Stehlik. Enrollment in U.S. undergraduate computer science programs has been rising for the last three years, according to the most recent Taulbee Survey, which is conducted by the Computing Research Association. “Our computer science program has had such an incredible amount of publicity lately,” says Harvey Mudd University’s Thyra Briggs. “Also, the increased presence of women in that department is affecting our applications.” Stanford University has seen its computer science majors increase by 83 percent in the last three years. “Our enrollment was up 30 percent this fall over last fall, and we expect to see continued growth on an annual basis,” says Stanford professor Mehran Sahami. In addition, 90 percent of Stanford’s nearly 7,000 undergraduates are currently taking at least one computer science course even though it is not required to graduate
https://launchpad.net/algorithms-animator
A little advanced but might be a able to use this with a younger group.
“Python application that implements and animates interactively those algorithms that are normally covered in an undergraduate course on the topic. It includes Insertion Sort, Quicksort, Mergesort, AVL Tree Search/Insert/Rebalance, Depth First Search, Breadth First Search, Topological Sort, Prim, Kruskal, Dijkstra, LCS, Huffman-Fano, and more. It is extensible. All the API are exposed. It includes a ready-to-run Windows executable (bin/AlgorithmsAnimator.exe), some documentation and a short tutorial about running time analysis (doc/csc321notes.pdf). This program was originally designed in 2003 for teaching “Design and Analysis of Algorithms” at DePaul University. All the algorithms in the source code (src/csc321algorithms.py) are equivalent line-by-line to the pseudo-code in the MIT CLRS “Introduction to Algorithms” book.”
http://algorithms.openmymind.net/
Descriptions and animations of some basic algorithms.
NY Times article about programming tools for kids.
https://bitbucket.org/leeharr/vbot/wiki/Home
vBot is a visual programming game. Use a small set of command tiles to build a program. The program must control the vBot and make it activate every target using the limited command set.
