alice-teacher Wonderland: Prototyping CS Education in VR

[Eric Brown]

Dear All,

I hope this finds everyone doing well.  As always thank you all for your support of other members of this community.  It is amazing to watch all of the great knowledge being shared.

The Alice Team moving to the Entertainment Technology Center here at CMU has afforded us a wonderful opportunity to be the client for a graduate school project team (the core of the ETC experience) charged with exploring what CS education might look like in VR.

I wanted to share their work with all of you as it is exciting to see them getting up and running and starting to explore this space.  The mission for their project (as stated by the team):

The Wonderland project seeks to bring the core principals of The Alice Project into the world of virtual reality. We hope to prototype a variety of experiences that take advantage of the immersive nature of VR to introduce children to computational thinking without ever feeling like a lesson in programming. The most promising of these prototypes can then be integrated with the existing Alice curriculum to provide a whole new set of educational tools.

http://www.etc.cmu.edu/projects/wonderland/

The team is keeping a development blog that you can follow to read about their explorations and the thinking behind their experiments.  They also a have prototype section of the site where you will see them start to populate their work as they begin developing and testing ideas. 

The team does have a couple asks for our community that I wanted to pass along and see if we could recruit some of you for - One is to have CS educators take a quick survey.  This is to help them prioritize what concepts to explore and more:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdPUgYHAIXneIS3-Eufu-q0ZnSBVhqWl13cjWY6RbR_WCNetg/viewform

Secondly for those of you that may be in the Pittsburgh area the team would love to build a group of teachers willing to test and give feedback.  If you are interested in that please feel free to reach out to us and we will connect you.

P.S.  Thank you to everyone who has taken part in our previous surveys.  For those of you generous enough to agree to share your curriculum materials I am still planning on reaching out to you all as soon as I have a good process in place for cataloging and sharing all of your great work.

More news too come soon.

Sincerely,

Eric

Eric Brown
Alice Project
Carnegie Mellon University
m: +1.718.986.9469
e: ewbrown at andrew.cmu.edu