Through watching the Randy Pausch lecture (mentioned in my previous post) I discovered a great free tool for learning how to program, called Alice. What’s different about Alice is that it lets students learn the basics of object-oriented programming while avoiding a lot of the frustrations that normally come from this kind of exploration. It also makes it very easy to create working 3-D virtual worlds (it was originally conceived as a rapid prototyping tool for these environments).
As described by Caitlin Kelleher, Assistant Professor at Washington University in St. Louis and creator of Storytelling Alice (more on that below):
Alice is a programming environment for creating 3D animated virtual worlds that was designed to make programming accessible to novice programmers from middle school through early college. Alice provides a drag and drop environment which allows students to gain experience with a variety of programming constructs without encountering the frustrations of syntax errors. By making the process of learning less frustrating, Alice helps a broader spectrum of students interested in learning to program get started.
The Alice environment itself is getting an upgrade as well. While revolutionary as a programming tool, the animations it produces are rather crude looking. Through a partnership with Electronic Arts, the system will benefit from the visual resources of mega-popular video game The Sims, dramatically increasing the realism and range of options within Alice. As the March 2006 press release states:
The Sims content will transform the Alice software from a crude, 3D programming tool into a compelling and user-friendly programming environment. Development for Alice 3.0 will begin immediately and will span the next 18 to 24 months. Experts say that when the transformation is complete, the new programming environment will be in position to become the national standard for teaching software programming.
Earlier I mentioned Storytelling Alice. That’s a version written by Kelleher for her Ph.D. with the specific goal of enticing middle-school girls to try out programming through the promise of telling a story. Based on the research she was very successful…
Storytelling Alice provides a motivating context in which to learn programming. A study comparing middle school girls’ experiences with learning to program in Storytelling Alice and in a version of Alice without storytelling features (Generic Alice) showed that:
- Users of Storytelling Alice spent 42% more time programming than users of Generic Alice.
- Users of Storytelling Alice were more than three times as likely to sneak extra time to work on their programs as users of Generic Alice (51% of Storytelling Alice users vs. 16% of Generic Alice users snuck extra time to program).
- Despite the focus on making programming more fun, users of Storytelling Alice were just as successful at learning basic programming concepts as users of Generic Alice.
My impression is that the next version of Generic Alice will incorporate some of the ideas from Storytelling Alice. I hope that’s true.
As you may be able to tell, the prospect of making programming concepts more palatable (and even fun!) for a wider group of students, and girls in particular, excites me. Even if programming itself doesn’t become a passion or career path for kids, learning to think through a process in a detailed way, employing logic, developing troubleshooting skills, and creative problem-solving are just some of the major benefits that can be gained through an exploration of programming. I would in no way classify myself as a programmer, but I do have some experience with different programming languages and I can easily see how the concepts I apply when “playing with code” apply to other areas of my life as well.
As I implied above, creativity is a major part of programming, though it’s not always easily seen by non-programmers. In the end, that’s what is so attractive about Alice — it brings the creativity front-and-center and “tricks” the student into learning programming as a means to their creative end, which, really, is the way it should be.
If I had kids anywhere near the right ages to start exploring this kind of thing, I’d be all over it.
Technorati Tags: Alice 2.0, programming, The Sims, Randy Pausch, middle-school girls, education, creativity, technical skills
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