Those watching my blog's RSS feed (or those lucky enough to refresh it at the right time) may have noticed an odd little entry. No, this isn't (entirely) me going completely coconuts.

Now I'm hungry... Source

Jeffrey Elkner invited me to the National Educational Computing Conference at the DC Convention Center as part of his presentation on "Computer Programming for Everybody: Python in the Classroom". He brought Jamie Boisture (another of his students) and me to demo what students have accomplished when they got their hands on Python.

Jamie presented the Graphics API for Students of Python (GASP), something he's worked on for a long time. It's a very simple API meant to make simple graphics accessible to beginner programmers without requiring any knowledge of Tkinter, Gtk, or other interface programming to work. It's also one of those things I keep telling myself I have to check out sometime, but I never end up doing. Web stuff is way too fun. :)

I then presented on SchoolTool, CanDo, and tjTalk. I won't detail those much, but I will mention that I did talk about my (this) blog engine, and the educators there seemed to like it. To those who were later listening to Jeff while also watching the screen, you saw my code for the blog too, as indescipherable as it may have been.

Edit: It's not "this" blog engine anymore, the old one was scrapped.

So, this being my first ever appearance as any form of speaker or presenter at a conference, I'd like to especially thank any and everyone there for listening in... and even more if you're reading this. Particularly if you happen to be Pilar Wyman, who actually commented from her own computer on my test blog post!

Edit: If those who saw SchoolTool on the projector would like to mess with it, contact me to try it out.

In other news, happy 18th birthday to meeee!