Engaging middle school teachers and students with alice in a diverse set of subjects

  • Authors:

  • Susan H. Rodger;Jenna Hayes;Gaetjens Lezin;Henry Qin;Deborah Nelson;Ruth Tucker;Mercedes Lopez;Stephen Cooper;Wanda Dann;Don Slater

  • Affiliations:

  • Duke University, Durham, NC, USA;Duke University, Durham, NC, USA;SUNY Binghamton, Binghamton, NY, USA;Duke University, Durham, NC, USA;Duke University, Durham, NC, USA;Duke University, Durham, NC, USA;University of California at San Diego, San Diego, CA,, USA;Saint Joseph's University, Philadelphia, PA, USA;Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA;Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 40th ACM technical symposium on Computer science education
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

This paper describes the integration of the Alice 3D virtual worlds environment into a diverse set of subjects in middle school, including the development of tutorials, example worlds and lesson plans. In the summer of 2008 our experiences with middle school teachers included three-weeks of training in Alice and guidance in the development of lesson plans. Our experiences with middle school students involved two one-week summer camps of instruction in Alice. We found both the teachers and the students strongly engaged with Alice. The teachers created lesson plans with Alice worlds to interactively teach a topic and other lesson plans in which students build an Alice world on a particular topic either from scratch or using a template world. The students in the Alice camps had both instruction in Alice and free time to develop Alice worlds of their choice. We found that the students used a large variety of basic Alice concepts and computer science concepts in the worlds they built in their free time.