Alice by Tony Brown

1
AlicebyTony Brown
2
Why Alice?

• Developed for young learners
• Especially young women
• Similar syntax to Squeak
• Very readable code
• Drag and Drop interface

3

• Break to look at what I'm talking about.

4

• Not an attempt to dumb down CS
• Focus on fundamental programming
• Object Oriented concepts
• Problem Solving
• Logic

5
But Java is so easy
6
How does Alice help?

• New CS students get confused very easily
• Change the design technique to Storyboards
• Motivating
• Use visualization with rapid prototyping
• Data is visible
• Drag and Drop

7
Can I use Alice?

• Free download
• Free teaching material
• Easy setup
• Free 3D Models

8
Do other people use Alice?

• Over 3000 colleges use it already.
• Over 1 million downloads
• Alice improves grades and retention

9
Fall of Greatness

• Total

10
(No Transcript)
11
Problems?

• Not true Object Oriented
• No way to implement
• Overriding
• Polymorphism
• Programming after Alice (CS2)?

12
The Future Alice 3

• Better Graphics
• Fully Object Oriented
• Line for Line equivalence to Java
• Java IDE
• The Sims 2
• Simpler interface (puzzle pieces)?

13
Alice version 2
14
Alice version 3
15
Equivalence

• Alice Code Java
  Code

16
Questions

• Last day, you don't have to do these?

17
References

• Jana, Reena. Can the Sims Make Programming Cool
  Again? Business Week Online (07, Nov. 2006)?
• Kelleher, Caitlin, Pausch Randy, Using
  storytelling to motivate programming
  Communications of the ACM, Vol 50(7), 58-64, 2007
• M. Moskal, D. Lurie, and S. Cooper, Evaluating
  the Effectiveness of a New Instructional
  Approach. In Proceedings of 2004 SIGCSE
  Conference, (Norfolk, VA).
• Sykes, Edward R., Determining the effectiveness
  of the 3d alice programming environment at the
  computer science 1 level J. Educational
  Computing Research, Vol 36(2) 223-244, 2007
• www.alice.org
• www.aliceprogramming.net