I recently attended the first Parallel Programming MeetUp in Santa Clara California at Intel HQ. The event was put on and hosted by my colleague, Parallel Computing Community Manager, Kathy Farrel. The event was attended by developers, students and academics and was both informative, in that it brought together folks from various segments of the parallel programming community, useful, in that it helped them build contacts with teach other and with Intel and fun. There was even pretty good food considering it was a corporate event ;-)

Last week at IDF, I had the pleasure of being on the panel - "It's All a Game" with Contra Costa's Professor Tom Murphy, and Intel's Brad Werth. One subliminal - or may be not so subliminal - message that I continued to evangelize (even at this panel) is the suitability of Games as a vehicle for education.

Sure they are complicated, feature many lines of code, involve frameworks, engines, and systems spanning various facets of computer system. But that's what makes them the most appropriate vehicle for education. Let me elaborate.

A new goal for my educational efforts coalesced today: fostering viral education.

I've known for awhile that I could sometimes infect a student; get them working on a problem/project/idea, where they spend lots of time outside of class on this effort. It hadn't occurred to me till today that this notion could be generalized to one student infecting another student.

The culprit catalyst has a two word title: Project Euler.