[K12OSN] OT: Alice.org

[Todd O'Bryan]

On Wed, 2007-10-17 at 11:53 -0400, Tom Hoffman wrote:
> On 10/17/07, Huck <dhuckaby at paasda.org> wrote:
> 
> > honestly Alice looked like more of a, "Johnny, you're done with all of
> > your work? Great! You can go use the computer and make a nice little
> > story of Jack and the Beanstalk using Alice."
> 
> To be fair, what Alice is designed for is to allow non-prorgrammers at
> Carnegie Mellon to create 3-d applications.  It isn't trivial, but it
> also is not literally designed to teach programming (it would actually
> be more correct to say it is designed to NOT teach programming).  But
> it is sophisticated in its own way and scratches the author's itch.
> 
> There was a proposal written (like, six years ago) by Guido van Rossum
> (the creator of Python) and others to get funding to create a version
> of Alice aimed at teaching programming to secondary students, but it
> never got off the ground.
> 
Actually, they market it as an alternative to CS1 and many colleges use
it for that. The book produced by the team is called "Learning to
Program with Alice." To be fair, you can do things like recursion,
create lists of objects, event-driven programming, and other interesting
topics, so it's far more than just a toy, and they do have some good
data that show it's effective at retaining students into later CS
classes than traditional intro courses.

And the Alice team got a *HUGE* NSF grant to promote it as a new CS1
alternative.

Todd