I’ve put together the first version of a simple program for displaying flashcards in fullscreen, mainly as an exercise in WPF but also because its damn useful for all sorts of teaching environments. Flash cards are simple text files that anyone can edit – just load them up and hit spacebar to cycle through them. “Big Flash Cards” is now at version 0.1 🙂 It supports Unicode so is perfect for Japanese lessons, for which I designed it.

Wow. Microsoft has just launched “DreamSpark” – a programme that lets higher education students download pro Microsoft development tools – not the cut-down Express versions of Visual Studio, but the full Professional editions. UK Microsoft student champ Ed Dunhill sums it up the best on his blog here. You get access to: Visual Studio 2008 Pro The whole Expression suite SQL Server 2005 Developer edition Windows Server 2003 Standard (and hopefully soon 2008) The best bit is a whole years XNA Creators Club subscription FREE!

For Japanese language practice for my course I use PocketStackz by some chaps called “Minddate software”. Its an all-purpose language flashcard program with an emphasis on Asian languages (such as that an Asian Unicode font needs to be installed on your PocketPC). What sets it apart is that you can immediately see what words you need to study at any point since the program sorts the words into “stacks” from “unknown” on the left to “known” on the right.