ment with concrete objects that make it easy for students to create expressive animated movies, similar to film shorts created by professionals in animation studios such as Pixar and Disney. Students are engaged by the whimsical characters and get caught up in the excitement of creating animated movies or simple games. Students are learning how to create an animation, but also are learning about sequence, conditionals, Boolean expressions, repetition, and even concurrent execution.

Alice 2 brings a different form of magic and beauty into teaching and learning fundamental programming concepts as students build animated movies and interactive games. Alice’s drag-and-drop editor prevents syntax errors that often frustrate beginning programmers. And, by engaging and stimulating students’ creativity, Alice encourages students to invest more time on task. But does it work? Do students actually learn the concepts? Is it effective in retaining students?

The Alice approach consists of the current Alice 2 and Learning to Program with Alice2 pedagogy and instructional materials, which were developed and disseminated with NSF support. To investigate the effectiveness of this approach, we carried out a pilot study, primarily targeting a pre-CS1 audience. 3 In this study, we saw that at-risk computing majors who were exposed to Alice were nearly twice as likely to continue on to CS2 as their control-group peers who had not been exposed to Alice (88% versus 47% retention). Beyond CS2, the at-risk students who had been exposed to Alice performed comparably to their non-at-risk peers. Unfortunately, the high attrition among at-risk students who had not been exposed to Alice resulted in too few control-group students remaining to meaningfully measure how they performed in later courses as compared to the students who had been exposed to Alice.

We have been tracking Alice adoption in colleges. To our knowledge, well over 10% of colleges and universities in the U.S. have adopted Alice and we are currently experiencing an explosion into high schools, as well as increasingly with schools abroad and in middle school. We distribute our monthly Alice e-newsletter to more than 2,000 educators (nearly half of whom are K– 12

The teacher can
gradually lead
students from the
concrete context of
animation to abstract
data and structures
in Java and a
traditional context.

teachers, and more than 300 of whom have email addresses indicating they teach at institutions outside the U.S.).

moving from the concrete
to the Abstract

Alice 2 provides the concrete, but what about the abstract? No matter how much fun Alice 2 may be, computing students must eventually move to the abstract and into a production-level language such as Java, C++, Python, C#, or (your choice here). And, one message we have heard loud and clear from many computing educators at liberal arts and community colleges and at comprehensive universities is a demand for software, curriculum, and instructional materials that can be used to blend the Alice approach with Java in a regular CS1 course. One reason for this demand is the difficulty of adding a pre-CS1 course to curricula in liberal arts colleges where the number of courses that can be offered is limited by two factors: a small number of faculty available for teaching courses; and the need to balance the number of courses required for the major with a heavy load of required general education courses. Responding to this demand, Alice 3 targets CS1 or AP CS courses. (Alice 2 continues to be supported for pre-CS1 and CS0 courses.)

Alice 3 is currently undergoing extensive beta testing. Not only are we tracking bugs we are also obtaining feedback from teachers and students regarding three important features designed to support a concrete to abstract approach. The first is the teacher

has a choice regarding how close to Java their students will begin. Two versions of the drag-and-drop interface are provided: one in a familiar, natural language style and with minimal syntax and one in actual Java code.

The second feature is more subtle. Animation programs constructed in Alice 2 use built-in motion methods, (such as move, turn, and roll). This means students sometimes need to focus attention on mechanics of turning an object’s body joints to obtain a reasonable walk, skate, or peck (for a chicken) animation. Alice 3 provides two galleries with a richer set of animations: the Alice 2 characters and the Sims2 characters (contributed by Electronic Arts). Richer primitive animations enable students to design and program animations at a higher, more abstract level.

The third feature is a transition option that allows students to “open the hood” and type Java code, edit, and run it in the NetBeans text-based Java integrated development environment. This provides an ability to start in Alice’s 3D animation environment and transition to programming in actual Java code. The teacher can gradually lead students from the concrete context of animation to abstract data and structures in Java and a traditional context.

The path toward helping students think “like a computer scientist… thinking at multiple levels of abstraction” 6 is an exciting and challenging one. We believe Alice 3 is one step along that path.

 

References

1. Computing research association; http://www.cra.org/.

2. Dann, W.P., Cooper, s,. and Pausch, r. Learning to Program with Alice. Prentice hall, 2006.

3. Moskal, b., lurie, D., and Cooper, s. evaluating the effectiveness of a new instructional approach. In Proceedings of the 35th SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (norfolk, Virginia, March 3–7, 2004). sIGCse ‘04. aCM, new york, ny, 75–79.

4. rutherford, f.J. and ahlgren, a. Science for All Americans. second edition. oxford university Press, 1991.

5. Violino, b. time to reboot. Commun. ACM 52, 4 (apr. 2009), 19.

6. Wing, J. M. Computational thinking. Commun. ACM 49, 3 (Mar. 2006), 33–35.

 

Wanda Dann ( [e-mail]) is the director of the alice Project and an associate teaching professor in the computer science department at Carnegie Mellon university, Pittsburgh, Pa.

Stephen Cooper ( [e-mail]) is an associate professor and the director of the Center for Visualization at saint Joseph’s university, Philadelphia, Pa.