Engaging middle school teachers and students with alice in a diverse set of subjects

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Engaging middle school teachers and students with alice in a diverse set of subjects

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Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education archive
Proceedings of the 40th ACM technical symposium on Computer science education table of contents

Chattanooga, TN, USA

SESSION: Graphical introduction to programming in K-12 table of contents

Pages 271-275

Year of Publication: 2009

ISBN:978-1-60558-183-5

Also published in ...

Authors

Susan H. Rodger	Duke University, Durham, NC, USA
Jenna Hayes	Duke University, Durham, NC, USA
Gaetjens Lezin	SUNY Binghamton, Binghamton, NY, USA
Henry Qin	Duke University, Durham, NC, USA
Deborah Nelson	Duke University, Durham, NC, USA
Ruth Tucker	Duke University, Durham, NC, USA
Mercedes Lopez	University of California at San Diego, San Diego, CA,, USA
Stephen Cooper	Saint Joseph's University, Philadelphia, PA, USA
Wanda Dann	Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
Don Slater	Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

Sponsors

SIGCSE: ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education
ACM: Association for Computing Machinery

Publisher

ACM New York, NY, USA

Bibliometrics

Downloads (6 Weeks): 27, Downloads (12 Months): 127, Citation Count: 0

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ABSTRACT

This paper describes the integration of the Alice 3D virtual worlds environment into a diverse set of subjects in middle school, including the development of tutorials, example worlds and lesson plans. In the summer of 2008 our experiences with middle school teachers included three-weeks of training in Alice and guidance in the development of lesson plans. Our experiences with middle school students involved two one-week summer camps of instruction in Alice. We found both the teachers and the students strongly engaged with Alice. The teachers created lesson plans with Alice worlds to interactively teach a topic and other lesson plans in which students build an Alice world on a particular topic either from scratch or using a template world. The students in the Alice camps had both instruction in Alice and free time to develop Alice worlds of their choice. We found that the students used a large variety of basic Alice concepts and computer science concepts in the worlds they built in their free time.

REFERENCES

Note: OCR errors may be found in this Reference List extracted from the full text article. ACM has opted to expose the complete List rather than only correct and linked references.

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