This month we’re celebrating the end of a fantastic year, full of progress and accomplishments by all of the awesome students in the Treehouse community. In addition, we’re looking forward to the start of 2014, a new year of learning and exciting opportunities. So to celebrate, we’re hosting a very special festive celebration.

Starting today (December 20th, 2013) we’ll be counting down to the end of the year with 12 days of Holiday Cheer Giveaways! We have loads of exciting prizes to give away including: Treehouse t-shirts, sweatshirts, stickers, gift packs; licenses to Sublime Text 2, Adobe Creative Suite, Linode, GitHub, Balsamiq; and much more. Finally, on New Year’s Eve we’ll be giving away our grand prize, an iPad Air!

How it Works

Each day for the next 12 days a giveaway will go live at midnight and run till midnight ET. Remember that each day is a separate and new giveaway, so you’ll need to check back here daily to enter. Each student can only enter once per day, and winners will be selected at random the day after a giveaway has ended.

Day One: Sticker Pack

To kick off the Holiday Cheer, today we’re giving away packs of five high-quality Treehouse and Mike the Frog stickers. There will be 40 winners for today’s giveaway, so be sure to enter for a chance to win.

Give Yourself A Gift!

If you’re not a Treehouse student yet, sign up now for a chance to win some of these great prizes and get a 14 day free trial of Treehouse.

Good luck everyone and Happy Holidays!

The post Holiday Cheer Giveaways appeared first on Treehouse Blog.

Another chance to catch the most interesting, and important, articles from the previous week on MIT Technology Review.

Since UMBC opened its doors in September of 1966, a lot has changed. Thanks to donors like you, this place has grown and expanded in unbelievable ways. But one thing that hasn’t changed is the focus on a well-rounded college experience. From sunrise to sunset, UMBC hums with activity. Students shift from class, research and creative endeavors to sporting events, festivals and concerts. They work together everyday to build a vibrant and dynamic campus community. Just like there is no typical day at UMBC, there is no typical UMBC student. So we thought you might enjoy the chance to catch a glimpse at today’s UMBC through the eyes of one of those students, Tolu Omokehinde, a Meyerhoff Scholar and Biochemistry major with a passion for time lapse photography.

Take a moment to invest in students like Tolu.

The Education and Outreach Working Group (EOWG) has published an updated draft of the WAI resource Easy Checks – A First Review of Web Accessibility. Easy Checks helps you assess if a Web page addresses accessibility. It provides simple steps for anyone who can use the Web; no accessibility knowledge or skill is required. The checks cover just a few accessibility issues and are designed to be quick and easy, rather than definitive. Learn about the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).

There’s a bench just outside UMBC’s Public Policy building. It’s a quiet, unassuming bench. But if you take a moment to read its engraved plaque, you’ll see there’s a story behind that bench — a story about a man named Jim Kruger.

Jim is a 2013 graduate of UMBC, but in many ways, he’s very different from his classmates. For starters, Jim’s a grandfather. He came to UMBC through Maryland’s Golden ID program, which helps people over 60 return to school to earn or complete a degree.

When he graduated from high school, Jim went straight to the Community College of Baltimore County. But, in the way that it does, life happened. Jim and his wife Kathy got married and had kids. As any parent knows, working and raising a family takes time and energy, and so Jim left school to devote himself to raising his beautiful family and running his own business. But as his kids got older and he moved into retirement, Jim had an idea.

“As I watched my daughters graduate [from college],” he says, “I realized, ‘I should do that, too.’”

He went back and finished his associate’s at CCBC, then decided he’d seize the chance to transfer to UMBC and earn his bachelor’s degree. He met with an admissions counselor and decided to study political science. He still remembers his very first class with Professor Laura Hussey. “She owned the classroom,” he recalls. “I was so impressed with her.”

Jim found that he loved being in the classroom. In particular, he enjoyed the wide range of perspectives and experiences that his classmates brought to the coursework. He found himself with a whole new group of friends and mentors.

Jim also got involved outside the classroom. “I took advantage of the full range of the UMBC experience,” he says. He and his wife regularly attend theatre productions and he likes to take his grandsons to basketball games. It’s no surprise how integral he became to the UMBC community.

When Jim walked across the stage to receive his diploma in May 2013, Kathy knew she wanted to commemorate the occasion with a meaningful gift. She settled on a bench, which would beautify the campus and give Jim a place to rest when he was walking between classes, since he had decided to continue on as a graduate student at UMBC.

“He’s enjoyed being here,” says Kathy. “To me, it was a nice connection.”

Jim, of course, loves the bench. “It’s the perfect gift,” he says. “That’s community–it makes people linger and talk.”

Learn more about how you can invest in UMBC.

Christmas is nearly upon us, and for web designers, traditionally that means a huge slowdown in the work coming in the door. So what are you to do with all that spare time?

Well, why not take advantage of this great offer from our sister-site, MightyDeals.com, and purchase this incredible set of eBooks from Smashing Magazine.

Then be ready to hit the ground running in January with your new-found expert status!

This brilliant value bundle includes 7 essential eBooks, covering Photoshop, Fireworks, Illustrator, and clever techniques for mastering the web.

Smashing Book #3: Redesign the Web is 340 pages of UX, HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript tips and techniques to help you stand out from the crowd and deliver the best work you can in 2014.

Smashing Book #3 1/3: The Extension picks up where Smashing Book #3 left off, covering even more essential techniques and an in-depth case study of Smashing Magazine’s responsive redesign.

Mastering Photoshop for Web Design, Volumes 1, 2 & 3 contain over 660 pages of solid advice, tricks and tips for mastering the daddy of all image editing applications. You’ll learn everything from color management to typography, photo retouching to design etiquette. These three books are essential for anyone serious about their craft.

Mastering Illustrator is a 283 page eBook that will teach you the essentials of one of the world’s best Vector applications. You’ll learn to use this incredible program to create vector graphics and prepare artwork for the web.

Mastering Fireworks is 309 pages of Fireworks goodness, covering the full power of Adobe Fireworks, including the design workflow, extracting logos with levels and creating a pattern library. A must have for any aspiring web designer.

Each eBook comes in three DRM-free formats, PDF, ePUB and Mobipocket.

Normally retailing at $44, you can download the entire set today for just $18, that’s a mighty 59% saving. Head over to MightyDeals.com right now to grab this sensational deal.

Have you read books from the Smashing collection? Which book was the best value for money? Let us know in the comments.

Featured image/thumbnail, uses flat iPad mockup via Pixeden

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