Google Pac-Man

People Playing Google Pac-Man Wastes 4.8 Million Hours

The 30th anniversary of Pac-Man has come and gone.  What a cool game!
I remember playing Pac-Man on 25 cent arcade machines when I was a kid.
We had a local arcade / pizza house that all sorts of video games.
We had Space Invaders, Frogger, Galaga, Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Phoenix, and Asteroids just to name a few.

Due to my fond feelings about arcade games and my perception that my students like them as well, I have my students complete several of these games in my classes.
I have a GridWorld Snake Project that can easily become PacMan.

I also have Space Invaders and Pong projects using Frames and Java Graphics.
I ported over my Pong project over to Scratch and use that in our intro CS class.
We also created Pac-Man in XNA / C# as an end of year project.  The students had to research grid-based gaming and the A* algorithm.  The project was fun.
My students love building interactive projects and really enjoying playing what they create as well as playing what others in class create.
It is very educational for the students to design and build a game and then explain that creative process to other students.

Google Report on Jobs

News Flash!
Google is creating jobs.
Lots of cool information here showing how Google creates jobs.
The jobs are typically tech related.

http://byob.berkeley.edu/

If you have not seen this yet and you already use Scratch, you have to check it out.
If you have never used Scratch, this may be the new version that you needed to get started.
The new version of Scratch allows you to add in methods essentially as you can combine blocks to make your own new blocks.
It is very nice and my students are really enjoying it.

Paper Supercapacitor Powers Paper Electronics

Electronic devices were taking the place of paper and now paper electronic devices may be taking the place of electronics and paper.  That is one crazy logic statement.
Paper Electronics = ! Electronics and ! Paper
That is just wacky, but it looks really cool.
I would love to have an electronic paper book that could make me a sandwich!

Robotic Car Parks Itself

I may have  to look into getting one of these at some point.

Could Robots Accidentally Hurt Humans?

This study examined situations in which robots might accidentally harm humans.  Low and behold, they found that robots might accidentally hurt humans.  Humans accidentally hurt humans all of the time so it really is no surprise that robots might do the same.  When my Lego NXT creations start chasing me around my house looking for a fight, then I will start to worry.