Out and About in Raleigh

Raleigh State Capitol Building

Lesson 1: Raleigh is properly pronounced “Raw-Lay” here. Lesson 2: It’s a very nice place. I had a quick wander around once I’d finished playing with my slide decks for tomorrow and sorting out emails and stuff. They have some lovely museums that I didn’t really have time to look round properly, but I did spend some time in the Museum Shop, which had some lovely stuff in it. And with it being Feb. 29th today they were offering 29% discount, which was very nice.

On the way back to the hotel I wandered past artspace. This was great. A large building has been given over to artists studios where you can view their work and even see them making it.

I had a quick wander round and even had a chat with some of the artists there. This chap, Kyle Highsmith, was even happy to have is picture taken. I loved his stuff, which you can see more of here. Unfortunately I don’t think any of his canvases would have fitted in my suitcase. There was a huge variety of work on show in Artspace with prices at all levels and anyone passing through Raleigh should seek it out.

If you need to find your way round the place….

If you are at SIGCSE and want to come along to my sessions tomorrow I’m doing two:

10:45 am–12:00 pm room 305A

Empowering Students: Teaching Software Development with Windows Phone

1:45–3:00 pm room 305A

Creative Uses for Kinect in Teaching—with Curriculum Materials

Flying to Raleigh

This is not Raleigh, this is Boston airport. It was pretty much dark when I arrived in Raleigh.

Flew out to Raleigh in North Carolina today to present some sessions about teaching with Windows Phone and Kinect. I’m speaking at SIGCSE 2012 and the thing that is worrying me most is that in my presenter bio I rather stupidly put “..and Rob knows a lot of jokes about cheese”. Snag is that at the moment I can only think of two…..

XNA Windows Phone Theme Library

Danny, one of our First Year students, is hard at work on his First Year programming coursework. This year the game is “Sweepy Cleaner”, an XNA game where you get to control a robot vacuum. I’ve even bought the domain name.

Danny made a version of Evil Squash last year for Windows Phone and he is now building a Sweepy Cleaner for the phone as well. And he has discovered that:

1. It is nice if a game has the same colour theme as the ones set for the phone by the user.
2. It is hard to get these colours from an XNA game

So he has written a little bit of code to get this information into a game, and released it as a dll that any XNA developer can use. Which is nice. You can find it here.

More HDR Fun

Yep. Think I’ll buy this program. This is Hull Holy Trinity Church by the way, think I’ll nip back there with a tripod next week and take some proper shots.

Saturday Open Day

Saturday open days are always busy, this is some of the audience from today. Thanks for being another great audience and laughing at my jokes (at least most of them).

Just to show I have no fear, I set up the Kinect sensor and showed some demos of that before the actual talk, and it worked a treat, which is nice. You can click through the picture to the full size image on Flickr and also a picture of today’s lucky prize winner.