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April 21, 2005
Alice for 4H
Last year for the Tippecanoe County 4H computer project, I used C# and SharpDevelop to get the kids started with programming. It went OK. The kids were able to do a few things with graphics after the workshop. We focused on that because most of the kids were interested in making games.
This Saturday we're going to try something different. It is called Alice. It is a teaching environment developed at Carnegie Mellon. The best parts are that it is very graphical since most of the kids want to make games or do 3D animations but it teaches the basic concepts of programming. Supposedly, college students who learn Alice first do better with professional languages later than those thrown directly into Java or VB. There are quite a few learning languages and environemnts, but I was always hesitant to use them because I didn't want to limit the kids that really get into it.
The Alice environemnt has been pretty easy to learn so far, at least for the basics. Which is good. If I can't pick it up quick, then I can't really expect the kids to do it either. The only problem has been finding learning resources. The download comes with several tutorials that are good. But beyond that there isn't much of anything. Since this is used at several universities and community colleges, I expected to find a resource of lesson plans. If anyone knows where these are at, please email me. After Saturday, I'll post the tutorial I'm creating.
[Update] I didn't end up creating a tutorial. I used the first 3 tutorials that come with Alice. Overall, it went really well. The kids seemed to really get into it and figured out how to do a lot of things on their own. In fact, we skipped the fourth tutorial because I didn't want to interrupt them.
Posted by mikel at April 21, 2005 09:12 AM
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