Europe Code Week 2015: Cocktails At Microsoft, 'Ode To Code' Robot Dancing 15
theodp writes: In case your invite to next week's Europe Code Week 2015 kickoff celebration at the Microsoft Centre in Brussels was lost in the e-mail, you can apparently still invite yourself. "Let's meet to celebrate coding as an empowering competence, key for maintaining our society vibrant and securing the prosperity of our European digital economy," reads the invite at the Microsoft and Facebook-powered All you Need is Code website. And to "keep raising awareness of the importance of computational thinking beyond Code Week," EU Code Week is also running an Ode to Code Video Contest, asking people to make short YouTube videos showing how the event's Ode to Code soundtrack causes uncontrollable robot dancing (video) and flash mobs (video). Things sure have changed since thirty years ago, when schoolchildren were provided with materials like The BASIC Book to foster computational thinking!
I've already had Microsoft's cocktails (Score:2)
I had 'em at GDC 2000. They looked good from a distance, but once you got up close you found out they were cheap and sloppy. You might still take one for free, but you'd be skeptical of the contents.
I would say that I only wish this were a lie, but that would be a lie. I'm right chuffed that their trade show tendencies follow their products.
A Microsoft party you say? (Score:2)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cX4t5-YpHQ
Thirty years ago... (Score:2)
>> Things sure have changed since thirty years ago, when schoolchildren were provided with materials like The BASIC Book to foster computational thinking!
Thirty years ago, we learned by sitting down in front an Apple II. You either learned the command line and programmed in BASIC or you didn't get to play any games at all. It was a great, distraction-free environment to learn the, er, basics.
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I had to learn on Pascal, you insensitive clods!
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No games? Choplifter. Aztec. Wizardry. Karateka. Flight Simulator. There were *lots* of fantastic games for the Apple II.
I still learned AppleBASIC and made my own games though. Thirty years later, I'm still making games for a living. I have to admit, I'm sort of surprised it worked out as planned.
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Moon Patrol (Cracked by The Nibbler) was the popular game title in my middle school Apple ][e lab.
Code code code coding code code everybody code (Score:2)
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Africa Code Week [africacodeweek.org] is also underway. Don't believe Antarctica Code Week's been claimed yet, if you want to beat Microsoft to it. :-)