[K12OSN] OT: Alice.org

[Tom Hoffman]

On 10/17/07, Todd O'Bryan <toddobryan at mac.com> wrote:
> 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.

I guess I haven't been keeping up...

--Tom