alice-teacher Teaching Alice to young children

[Bill Dunklau]

Suki,

I did not see a reply to your request, so will go ahead and post the
response I had sent to you (which got a "You do not have permission to
send to this recipient." notification).

Here are some of the books you might look at:
Starting out with Alice, by Tony Gaddis,
Learning to Program with Alice, by Dann, et. al.,
An Introduction to Programming Using Alice, by Herbert, and
Alice in Action with Java, by Adams (600 pages, the most thorough of the
group).

Note:  I have not purchased any Alice books for a few years, so there
could be new ones.

Susan Rodger has materials at
http://www.cs.duke.edu/csed/alice/aliceInSchools/.

Other Duke materials are at
www.cs.duke.edu/csed/alice09/tutorials.php. 

Dick Baldwin has materials at: www.dickbaldwin.com/tocalice.htm.

Barb Ericson hosts The Alice Tea Party Web Site at:
http://home.cc.gatech.edu/TeaParty/

I am sure I have missed valuable and beneficial print materials and web
resources, so I hope others will fill in the gaps (if they haven't
already).

Bill Dunklau
Lakehill Preparatory School
www.lakehillprep.org 
214-826-2931  X 225


-----Original Message-----
Date: Sun, 24 Oct 2010 10:51:48 -0700
From: "Susana (Suki) Wessling" <suki at sukiwessling.com>
Subject: alice-teacher Teaching Alice to young children
To: alice-teachers at lists.andrew.cmu.edu
Message-ID: <669FEBFB-2547-4E1E-B5FA-F81EDE186E4E at sukiwessling.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

Hi everybody,

I wanted to introduce myself and let you know what I'm doing in case you
have any insights for me.

I homeschool my two children, aged 7 and 11. I started homeschooling my
son, 11, this year in part because I wanted him to have time to explore
his passions, one of which is programming. He'd been using Scratch for a
long time, so for variety we decided to form a club to learn Alice with
other kids. I knew going in that he was going to be light-years ahead of
the other kids, so I'm calling it a "club" and I'm only giving very
open-ended assignments if I give them to the whole group. The group
ranges from one other boy, 9, who has programming experience, down to
one girl, 7, who has not used computers very much. Presently we're at 7
kids.

One of the things that I have been exploring as a former college English
teacher and a homeschooler is that kids can be taught advanced concepts
at a level that they understand, and having these advanced concepts
actually helps them learn the basics that they haven't mastered yet. I
follow this logic in teaching my 7-year-old math: she has never been
interested in doing all the math facts work required at her age (she's
officially doing 3rd grade math), but she loves concepts like working
with prime numbers, tessellations, and she's obsessed with tesseracts!
These interests give her inspiration to learn the "boring" stuff.

So far in our Alice club, I've been working on getting the novice users
to learn all the tools and experiment with moving the objects in space.
Last week I gave them an assignment to write a program in which the main
method calls another method. (This was the point at which,
unfortunately, two girls decided to drop out, so perhaps I may have
pushed that too early for them!) The two with programming experience are
working on creating worlds that they can interact with. I am planning to
have my son attempt to rewrite some of the programs he's written in
Scratch, because he's presently under the misimpression that Alice
"can't do math stuff."

My question for all of you is whether you have suggestions for basic
assignments I can give the kids to teach them the fundamentals of
programming, without making the assignment too hard or more complex than
they can understand. By having them create a method that is called by
another method, for example, I was introducing the idea that pieces of
code can be compartmentalized then reused. This is definitely not an
obvious concept to a 7-year-old, but it is a concept that can help them
in problem-solving in general.

I look forward to your input,

Suki
Susana (Suki) Wessling
SukiWessling.parentclickblogs.com |
Examiner.com/gifted-children-in-national
Suki's Parenting and Education Facebook Page

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