alice-teacher integrating Alice into classroom

[Don Slater]

In our experience in teaching with Alice 3 at Carnegie Mellon (our course was for non-majors), we tried several approaches.

1) All Alice all the time for the first half of the course, and then a complete transition to nothing but Java. 
   --- We found that the students developed a mindset  that they were experiencing two different courses, and it was hard for them to make the connection that the concepts that they had learned in Alice were the same concepts that we expected them to learn in Java. 
   --- Time was also an issue. (Isn't it always?) We spent more time in Alice than we had planned, really crunching the time the students had with Java. 
   --- Also, we did not factor in as well as we should have the time it took the students to get comfortable with the NetBeans IDE.

2) We tried an approach in which we  essentially taught Alice and taught Java side by side. Teach a concept in Alice, and then jump into Java right away
   --- We found this muddied the water too much for the students. They never developed clarity and comfort the concepts, the IDE, the course in general.

3) The approach that worked best for us was to spend the first ~ 4 weeks introducing Alice and some fundamental ideas (i.e. writing methods with parameters for objects, using functions.) And then we would transition to Java and from that point in the course on we would introduce a topic in Alice, spend some time with it (which diminished over the semester), then build on that understanding in Java. By the end of the course, we might show them an example of a topic in Alice, and jump immediately to Java.
   --- This seemed to allow the students time to settle in with Alice and it's IDE, and the transition to the NetBeans IDE actually was smoother (but we also have to factor in our experience gained in helping students transition to NetBeans in earlier semesters.)
   --- This approach seemed to provide the students the most clarity and understanding of the topics, and they also developed a better understanding of the connection between Alice 3 and Java, and how to best use Alice to explore and deepen their understanding of the Java concept.

--- 
We are also aware of approaches in which instructors have created scenes in Alice 3, and had the students work with those scenes right from the beginning in NetBeans, not using the Alice 3 IDE at all, or minimally. We did not try this approach, and so I cannot comment on its effectiveness.

There are a lot of ideas that can be explored here in more detail. Thank you for this question, as this answer has given me the blog post for the day, So if you go to the blog today, the posting will look very familiar. ;-)

Let me know if you have any other questions.

All the best,
Don Slater


On Feb 19, 2013, at 9:12 AM, "Denise Gurer" <gurerd at cruzio.com> wrote:

> Hi all.
> I am teaching a high school CS class and am using Alice (ver 3) for the first time. Typically I use Netbeans only.  I am trying to figure out how to integrate Alice into my curriculum.  Should I start with Alice and then gradually bring in Netbeans so they are doing both in parallel.  Or should I teach with Alice for some weeks, and then switch to Netbeans?  My goal is to have them be able to Java code in Netbeans or some similar IDE.  The other goal is to teach basic computing skills (of course) which Alice does wonderfully.
>  
> I was hoping to get some feedback from those of you who have been using Alice for a while now.  Thanks for your time!
>  
> Denise
> =============
> Denise Gurer
> gurerd at cruzio.com
>  
>  
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> alice-teachers at lists.andrew.cmu.edu
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