alice-teacher Methods vs Procedures

[Don Slater]

If you look at any of our Alice 3 materials, you will see that we refer to that panel of the Alce IDE as the "methods" panel, and that we tend to refer to the tabs as the list of "procedural methods" or "functional methods".

One of the first computer languages that I taught was Pascal. And if you are familiar with the language, there is a very specific and intentional differentiation between procedures and functions, procedures being programming sub-routines that "do" something, and functions being programming sub-routines that are expressions, evaluating a statement and returning the result.

But then C came along and all sub-routines were called functions, and then OOP came along, and everything became a method. As a teacher, I always had problems with terminology with my students, often using phrasing like "void functions" or "non-void methods". When I discovered and started using Alice 2, I was thrilled that it gave me helpful terminology, "methods" and "functions". with the different terms in the IDE.

As we were designing Alice 3, we decided to make the tabs "procedures" and "functions" in the "methods panel", and talk about "procedural methods" and "functional methods". Then as we transition to Java, we can show the students in the code that those methods that have the void modifier are procedures, and if the modifier is anything else, those are the functions.

The students now have an understanding of what procedures are and what functions do because they can see procedures do something in Alice and have used functions to access information, and so the terminology is not a problem, and it is just easier for me to talk about in class.

Of course your mileage will vary, and many of you have found other ways to talk about this, but this decision makes the most sense for us in the context of the Alice IDE and how Alice works as a visual representation of a program.

All the best,
Don Slater

On Mar 28, 2013, at 4:23 PM, Sandy Graham <sandyg at gvtc.com> wrote:

> I "grew up" referencing procedures and had to work hard to change myself to reference methods. Now I see Alice 3 is back to using the term procedures. Can anyone explain the etymology of those two words?
> 
> Sandy Graham
> Sent from my iPhone
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