Office 2010 Discount blog the-wumpus-revealed

Thanks for your wonderful introduction Gretchen! I would like to turn it over to Phil now. Phil was one of the main people working on the project with Mr. Zoë and Louis. These guys put a lot of time outside of work with these kids and from what I hear enjoyed every minute! So without further introduction… Here's where it began... One day, a little over a year ago, my manager (apparently now named Mr. Zoë – as he;s referred to in a previous post – and starting tomorrow his new name amongst all of his coworkers and employees – and starting 3 days from now the name placard on his door)… Wait a minute, where was I? Right, so a little over a year ago my manager presented a very interesting opportunity to me: mentoring a high school intern. I have to admit, at the time I did not know much about the high school intern program, but it was all very exciting: an opportunity to help shape the future of a student on the cusp of making some big decisions about their future interests, education, and eventually career. Long story short (I might tell the long story later on this blog), the summer was a smashing success. Just as an example, the first three weeks of tasks that I planned out for this intern were all nearing completion about 3 days into her internship. By the end of the summer,Microsoft Office 2007 Professional, she had blown away my “stretch goal” for her, a C# program to generate sample vertex data to be used in our 3D graphics pipeline testing. Something like 4,000 lines of her code now sit proudly in our source code depot, several algorithms for generating vertex data: a monument to how far a sharp high school student can get with a challenging 3D graphics project in C# coming in with no experience in either of the two. Fast-forward 8 months. I;m sitting in a meeting with one of my employees, my manager, and a programming teacher from Newport High School that my intern introduced us to. We;re brainstorming about taking on a big challenge – a risk to be sure – of giving 6 high school programming students a collaborative project over a 3 month period – involving creating a complex graphics-based game. The risks? None of the students had used J# before (our choice language for this project). Most of the students had just 1-2 years programming experience. None of the students had worked on a group programming project. None of the students were familiar with the game that we wanted them to re-create (a modernized version of an old 1970;s text-based game called Hunt The Wumpus). None of the students had done any graphics-based programming. Completing this project within 3 months was a challenge to all: to the students,Office 2010 Discount, the teacher, and the three of us Microsoft employees that committed to driving (and grading!) the project. Before I get into the story of how the project unfolded, one thing I want to point out is the huge difference between what it takes for a student to take on a typical programming assignment (e.g., write a search, sort, whatever), versus what it takes to have 6 people work to produce their own parts of a game, such that all of the objects have to fit together and work in unison to make the game “play”. Think of a puzzle made up of 6 pieces. Our job was to work with those students to not only make an wonderful puzzle piece in itself,Office 2010 Pro Plus Key, but also to make sure that each piece fits perfectly with the adjacent pieces. If any one piece did not fit, the puzzle wouldn;t come together. This kind of discussion is a typical topic for a college software engineering course,Office 2010 Home And Business Key, but a topic rarely covered in high school programming classes. So, here;s how it went… The three of us from Microsoft went down to the high school once a week or once every two weeks, doing anything from lecturing on software architecture, to working one-on-one with the students,Windows 7 Enterprise, to explaining how to breakpoints. This project had started with nothing more than a printout of a spec we produced about the game rules and a description of J# objects that we thought we;d need to have the students create to make the game. Over the course of a few short months these students turned it into a reality. Everyone worked on their own puzzle piece, but talked with the other students that were working on the adjacent pieces. And when the time came, about halfway through the project, all the puzzle pieces fit. Want to know something interesting? More than once along the way, the students came to us with some solution that was better than what we;d envisioned. 3D rendered graphics for that game. A hand-written sort routine for ranking the high scores. A clever data structure for the cave interconnections (this game puts the player in a system of caves). They were stars at putting a new creative spin on our ideas. The finished project was 90% theirs and 10% ours. We just finished hosting this group (and some interested parents, coworkers, and siblings) at the Microsoft campus for a finale. Each student gave a presentation about what they learned (as did we . We took them for a tour of our labs, and tried to convince them that technology was an exciting thing to do in college, and in a career. We bribed them to get more interested in software, with a gift certificate to our company store. But nothing we could tell them could match what they had already experienced first-hand: I think we;ve already got some takers on a future in software. I can;t wait for next year.