alice-teacher Suitability of Alice 3 for Teaching 1st Year Uni?

[Michael Barlow]

Hi all. I'm an Australian university academic that has been using Alice
2.2 for teaching my Introduction to Computer Science first year (13
week) course for the past 2 years. My question regards the
suitability/stability/feature-set of Alice 3 to support/enhance that
course: i.e., should I switch to Alice 3 now (new course beginning in a
fortnight)?

 

I'm particularly keen to hear if anyone is currently using Alice 3 for
teaching, what their experience has been, and whether they feel it is an
improvement over 2.2 (I/we have had a number of issues with 2.2
including stability [corrupted saves or inability to save] and low
ceiling [limitations]).

 

I'd be particularly keen to hear any and all feedback from anyone with
experience with Alice 3 on the following topics:

*         Stability - Crashes, corrupted/lost saves, graphics glitches,
unreproducable behavior, ...

*         Features compared to 2.2 - In particular its ability (or lack
there of) to handle/represent events and data-structures such as arrays
or lists {It also looks like a lot of the World's utility [e.g., Math]
functions/procedures are gone - is that correct?}

*         Availability of Educational Material - Any slides, example
worlds, screenshots or other such material.

*         Student responses to Alice 3

 

Thanks in advance for any and all feedback.

 

By way of some additional background for those interested: Intro to CS
(I2CS) is the first course for students taking a major in Computer
Science (Bachelor of Science) here at UNSW at ADFA.  Students move onto
Java as our backbone teaching language in 2nd session (2nd part of first
year). While I2CS employs Alice it also "covers' (introduces students
to) a fair amount of "serious" CS - algorithms, OO design, theory of
computation/computability, data structures, Big-O notation. From some
perspectives it's a weird hybrid of fundamental/theoretic CS and
beginner ("toy" some would say) programming language. Yet it seems to
work quite well (if only Alice 2.2 were a bit more stable and more
feature rich).

 

Again, thanks for any and all responses.

 

 

 

Cheers - Spike

Dr. Michael Barlow

Senior Lecturer

School of Engineering & IT

UNSW @ ADFA

 

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