[K12OSN] OT: Alice.org

[Huck]

Yay, so after posting my initial reply...I then went home...dl'd Alice 
as well as StorytimeAlice...

went through the meager tutorials they gave...
and well...in my opinion it was FAR from teaching programming, and was 
more of a lesson in sequential step-building(some would argue 
programming is nothing more than that on a more complex scale).

I did see how you meant the students would take more time trying to get 
their animations LOOKING GOOD(since it is a VISUAL end-product) and 
dragging and dropping methods to and fro was just the means to the 
end(the end being a stellar animation! *what the kids ACTUALLY care 
about*)...

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."

--Huck

Todd O'Bryan wrote:
> The problem I noticed is that my students spent way more time using
> trial and error to get all the numbers right to make their animations
> look good than they did thinking.
> 
> The new version of Alice is supposed to have more interesting primitives
> built in so that students can concentrate more on the sequencing and
> problem solving than on the minutiae of getting things to look right. It
> should let teachers assign more interesting projects and let students do
> more higher level thinking.
> 
> Todd
> 
> On Tue, 2007-10-16 at 19:43 -0700, Huck wrote:
>> Todd, for the benefit of those of us who haven't had the chance...
>> what things weren't so good that are improving next year?
>>
>> --Huck
>>
>> Todd O'Bryan wrote:
>>> Wait for the next version, out next year. Alice would make a good intro
>>> to programming for middle school, but I didn't like it much when I used
>>> it as part of a pre-AP course.
>>>
>>> On Tue, 2007-10-16 at 21:36 -0400, Peter Hartmann wrote:
>>>> I just came across this free(as in beer) educational programming
>>>> software at Alice.org  developed at Carnegie Melon.   Just thought
>>>> people might want to be aware of it and also see if anyone has
>>>> experience with it, and to know what they thought.  It looks pretty
>>>> cool to me.
>>>>
>>>> Peter
>>>>
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