alice-teacher Coding Collaboration

[Steven Huss-Lederman]

One technique I have used is to have each team add methods to a character to do certain actions.  I then have them export the new character.  They then have to import the characters into a new world.  With the characters and the new capabilities they create a new story.  I have had them create methods that do somewhat different things but require similar coding techniques so all the students have a similar experience (not required but what I am aiming for).  There are some extra issues over the standard coding ones that can come up: import/export of characters; they reference another object so it breaks in the combined world; they find that it worked fine in the development world but due to different objects, sizes, locations, etc. it isn't perfect in the combined world.  I have them iterate back to the development world until they get it to work well.  They often work across teams at this point and I think that is good.  I have a sample one with a cat, bird and girl that uses three teams - I simply have multiples of 3 teams if I have more students (I do paired programming).  All of my materials are online at https://bcmoodle.beloit.edu/course/view.php?id=1665 where you login as guest to access the course.  This exercise is at the top of the September 19-September 25 week.  I can also provide the solution to teachers (not online) and the description in a format other than PDF.  I should update and make it look nicer but have not done that yet.

All the best,
Steve

On Sep 19, 2011, at 2:06 PM, Nuffer, Melanie wrote:

> Need some advice.
> 
> I'm trying to show my students the beauty of collaboration when programming. We would like to divide the program up into multiple methods and then be able to combine these methods into one larger program. Unfortunately we are still very new to Alice and don't know how to do this smoothly. We are currently using Alice 2.2.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: https://lists.andrew.cmu.edu/mailman/private/alice-teachers/attachments/20110919/865251c2/attachment.html