alice-teacher Teaching vocabulary via video game and Alice 3.x

[Dan Nissen]

All,
I have been thinking about this application for a long time and it might be time to try it.  I'd like to give my students in IT courses a video game that shows them a definition and asks them to type in the word, and then it credits their score in the game for successes.  They love playing video games, but practicing vocabulary, not so much. I know I can build a game with Alice, but the actual typing in of the words, and getting the vocabulary lists is the challenge.

1. Is there a way to build up an array of words and an array of definitions without building it as initial values in the source?  I can get the list as text documents, and I can write Java code to read it and populate the arrays.  Any other way, preferably in Alice?

2. Is there a good way to get the word typed in?  Again, I can see how I can do this part in Java, if I can fit the Java into the Alice world.

3. There was an earlier discussion of global variable access.  Did that get fixed?  I need that to maintain the score and increase it in separate routines.

4. My major question is how to approach source maintenance when I would like to frequently change an Alice world to improve/change the game, and then integrate it with Java code I will write to do things not possible in Alice.  I think I have to use the Netbeans plug-in to convert the Alice world, and then redo the changes to that generated Java to add back in the Java code.  Anybody got suggestions on how to make this easy?

Anybody tried anything like this?

Best regards,
Dan Nissen
Adjunct Instructor
Information & Computer Technology
Brown College
1345 Mendota Heights Road, Mendota Heights, MN 55120
5951 Earle Brown Dr, Brooklyn Center, MN 55430