Presenting to Students

It has been an extremely long time since I posted last. I apologize to everyone and I promise to get back in the groove soon. I have an amazing amount of stuff going on lately. Looking to buy a house, planning a wedding, a newborn son and training new people at work and working on two side jobs, needless to say I have been stretched a little thin. There is light at the end of the tunnel though.

Anyways, The topic of the post is presenting to students. I will be doing a presentation at a high school in the district at work to a class of technology help desk students. These are kids that are pretty much already technology savvy way before the age that we were first introduced to computers. I will be giving them a run-down on programming along with a couple of points that they will be quizzed on at a later date.

After mentioning this to Joe Ocampo, He noted that high school kids are always interested in game development. I went over the codeplex and downloaded the WickedGames open source game engine and the QuickStart Game engine so I could have some code to show them. The only thing that kinda stinks with the sample code is the fact that I am presenting for VMWare Fusion on my mac and apparently DirectX support in VMWare is pretty lacking at the moment. Either way, I’m sure they have seen running 3d games before so I will show them the code and go into a couple of different topics. 

Some of the other topics I will be presenting are along the lines of:

• The history of programming, giving a quick timeline of programming languages
• The cycle of developing a computer program with Agile Methodologies
• Programming techniques such as TDD/BDD
• How to learn programming with college, self learning and improvement
• Other topics TBA

After thinking about it for awhile I noticed that it was hard for me to describe how I got to the point I am at now. Every person follows a different learning path proceeding forward and it’s hard to describe. I thought it might be easy to stress that every person learns at their own pace in their own way and then tell the students the path that I took to get where I am currently at in the learning process. Above all, I want to stress an importance on constant, continuous learning as this is the key.

What does everyone else think of trying to describe the entire art of programming from languages to methologies in a little over an hour and a half without making their heads spin? =)