Vviewpoints
DOI: 10.1145/1536616.1536628
education
Alice 3: concrete
to Abstract
The innovative Alice 3 programming environment, currently in beta
testing, teaches students to program with Alice and Java software.
CompUtinG eDUcAtoRs Rec- oGnize a critical need for innovative change to attract and maintain a stable and more diverse incoming enrollment. As noted by Peter Denning,
“The loss of attraction to [comput-ing] comes from our being unable to
communicate the magic and beauty
of the field.”
5 The most recent Taul-bee Survey1 continues to indicate that
women, Hispanics, and other traditionally underrepresented groups
have not made enrollment gains over
the last decade and diversity is at a
record low. What innovative teaching
and learning strategies might attract
a more diverse student population
and maintain students in undergraduate computing programs?
Educators might well take a lesson
from colleagues in science and engineering, many of whom have struggled
with diversity and decreasing enrollments in decades past. The American
Association for the Advancement of
Science (well known for the journal
Science) has published Science for All
Americans,
4 a highly praised book that
describes science understandings all
students should learn. Importantly,
the authors devote an entire chapter
to emphasize how science is taught is
equally important with what is taught;
that is, pedagogy matters. A particularly relevant quote is that students’
learning progression is “usually from
the concrete to the abstract. Young
people can learn most readily about
Alice 3 array of sims2 objects mime together.
things that are tangible and directly
accessible to their senses—visual, auditory, tactile, and kinesthetic. With
experience, they grow in their ability
to understand abstract concepts, manipulate symbols, reason logically, and
generalize. These skills develop slowly,
however, and the dependence of most
people on concrete examples of new
ideas persists throughout life. Concrete
experiences are most effective in learning when they occur in the context of
some relevant conceptual structure.”
The assertions we’ve expressed
here raise three interesting issues
for computer science: the ubiquity of
science concepts; the importance of
context; and the movement from the
concrete to the abstract. The first is
related to aspects of science that all
