Learning to Program with Alice, Brief Edition
Learning to Program with Alice, Brief Edition
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This paper describes a few challenges and many rewards of piloting the teaching of the programming language, Alice, in our Upper School consisting of middle school (grades 6-8) and high school (grades 9-12). We teach Alice as a stand-alone course at both levels. We originally planned on introducing the same curriculum into the middle school as we did the high school, but we knew we would need to approach the material with the younger students at a slower pace. Surprisingly, middle school students excelled in Alice and were able to keep up with their high school counterparts. Currently, we are considering providing our academic teachers with Alice training, so it can be used more at the middle school level. A goal in our department is to utilize Alice as a cross-curricular application. Alice is an ideal way for students to explore the world of computer programing, and we are eager to lay the foundation for a lifelong interest in computer programming for many of our students. Now that we have entered into the second half of this first year of Alice, we are finding that students are very excited about learning this valuable and enjoyable application that they view as "fun" and "cool."