are gaining traction, however, through new pedagogic approaches such as Peer-Led Team-Learning, CS Unplugged, Supplemental Instruction, Project-Based Learning, and Problem-Based Learning.

These three issues are the driving force behind the creation of Alice 3, currently under development by the Alice team at Carnegie Mellon. Dennis Cosgrove, lead architect of Alice 2, is also the project scientist for developing the Alice 3 software.

Alice 3 code editor, scene editor, and runtime displays.

children must learn/know. Jeanette Wing, in her manifesto, Computational Thinking, argues analogously for the ubiquity of computation, as a skill that all must master. 6 She adds computational thinking as a fourth “analytical ability,” to reading, writing, and arithmetic, which all young people should be exposed to and given the opportunity to master. Certainly, it is interesting to explore how Alice helps students gain capability in computational thinking abilities, and we describe our work with Alice in this column.

The second issue raised is the importance of context. We believe context helps to communicate the “magic and beauty” of our discipline. Exciting work is going on in this space. There is much excitement about the potential for robotics. From Lego Mindstorms to Scribblers to Myro and Chiara, the possibilities offer great potential. Guzdial and Ericson have discovered that working with media is fun for students who love to build their own (scaled down) versions of Photoshop and Audacity. Alice (in 3D) and Scratch (in 2D) use animation, storytelling, and game authorship as a context in which to entice students toward computing. Lily-Pad Arduino is doing much the same through e-textiles.

In many ways, the third issue is the most challenging for computing educators. Attracting a more diverse student population and maintaining students in undergraduate computing programs should involve a teaching and learning strategy that begins with the concrete in a context familiar to students and then gradually leads to an understanding of the abstract. Our discipline is all about abstraction. But it is not clear how to begin with the concrete and then move to the abstract, particularly in introductory computer programming courses that use languages inherently dependant on abstraction. Exciting innovations

Alice 2 brings
a different form of
magic and beauty
into teaching and
learning fundamental
programming
concepts.
A Brief history of Alice

Under the leadership of the late Randy Pausch, Alice was originally developed as a rapid prototyping tool for virtual reality animation, complete with head-mounted devices and glove sensors. Pausch used the original Alice in his Building Virtual Worlds course, where students from different disciplines (CS, design, and art) had to work together in small groups, under short deadlines, to build and demonstrate virtual worlds. The students thought they were learning about virtual reality, but they were also learning how to work together with other people in a way that others would respect them and keep working with them. Encouraging students to learn one thing while they believe they are learning something else is what Pausch called a “head fake.” The course became so popular that it inspired a master’s degree program in the Entertainment Technology Center at CMU.

In the late 1990s, we joined with the Alice team to pursue a dream of evolving Alice into an educational software tool that could be used to gently introduce students to computer programming. The goal was to create a new version of Alice that would introduce students to object-oriented programming concepts using concrete, visual objects in a 3D graphical environment. The concrete objects would be things that are familiar in their real world: houses, trees, animals, people, cellphones, but in a virtual world where a person can be scared by a spooky sound while riding a bicycle home after sports practice, and turn to see… imagination takes over…and students spend hours learning how to program.

The head fake is still there. Alice 2 provides a 3D programming environ-