I’d like to thank Melissa Murphy for the video footage of our workshop and Cole Rodger Photographics for the photographs of our workshop.

Alice looks like a good opportunity to learn (to teach) programming. Have you followed up with teachers who have participated in your workshops to learn about their success stories? What have you heard?

We run a followup workshop each summer for teachers to have a chance to come back and share what they have done with Alice. Teachers will show us some of the Alice worlds their students have created. It is clear from those worlds that students really like the storytelling aspects of Alice.

Hi Susan!

This is Art Lopez from San Diego, and I am one of the pilot instructors for the AP CSP course and wrote one of the four curriculum planning and pacing guides for the College Board. I also have been trained by Beth Simon of UC San Diego to teach the AP CSP course with Alice, and met you at a SIGCSE conference. I have been using your tutorials to supplemental and teach the big ideas of the AP CSP course and have found it to be an awesome resource! My students are always exploring the different tutorials and programs that you can create with Alice, and it has really understand some difficult programming concepts taught in the course. Recently, the students were tasked to complete a Performance Task called Create, where they are required to create their own programs that incorporate both algorithms and abstraction. Many of the them used the code created in these tutorials and added them to the programs they were creating. Having your tutorials available have really helped both my students and me to really understand computing and computational thinking. What is really cool is that it addresses an inequity access issue, by broadening participation for underrepresented groups in Computer Science such as young women and ethnically diverse students. The website and tutorials have really helped out these students from my high school and the teachers teaching this course as well! Both Beth Simon and you are just doing some great work to reach out to so many students and providing them exposure and access to this field. Again, thanks for the wonderful work you are doing!

Art Lopez.

Art,
Great to hear from you. Yes all our materials (our tutorials and all the lesson plans that teachers attending our workshops have created) are free so people can enjoy using them. It is also great that CMU has made Alice available for free at Alice.org.
It’s great to hear about your successes.
Susan

I really appreciate hearing that you are working with a variety of teachers from multiple disciplines. It is great to see that the teachers are finding ways to incorporate the program into their curriculum.

Can you elaborate more on the professional development. What is the length of the pd? How are you recruiting teachers to sign up? What kind of scaffolding and support are you able to offer them? What is the expected level of programming teacher have when they start the course.

What are some of the barriers or challenges you have experienced with this project? What have been some of your greatest successes?

Our professional development is two-weeks in the summer. We teach the teachers how to program the first week and then work with them on building lesson plans specific to their discipline. We have created a large number of tutorials and sample projects, many we use in our workshops and teachers or anyone are free to use them in teaching. This summer we are running workshops in NC, SC, and Nebraska. Our workshops are for beginners. We recruit mostly NC teachers but about 10% of our teachers are from other states. We recruit through mailing lists through the NC Dept of Public Instruction. We do provide a followup workshop the following summer for teachers to come back and discuss what they have done. We encourage them to join the Alice.org teachers mailing list. The Alice Team at CMU provides support and answers technical questions through their teacher listserv.

The story telling aspect of this project is really compelling. Have you found that certain teachers (e.g., English teachers) are more effective at helping students learn to tell stories using Alice?

In SC, our professional development is 8 days. The first five are totally devoted to Alice instruction while the next three are split between Alice instruction and curriculum development. Most of our teachers (95%) come from South Carolina schools. In the first years of the project, most were high school computing teachers. In the last two years, a large number of middle school teachers and teachers from other disciplines have applied for the workshop. The State Department of Education and former attendees advertise our workshops. After the first year, we have a one-day follow-up where teachers present worlds from their students, ask Alice questions, and discuss the year’s experiences.

I have also used Alice in teacher professional development and ran Alice competitions as well for middle and high school students. Some students created terrific 3D movies and games in Alice 2. See https://www.dropbox.com/s/9xhjemv3608dpdl/Alice... for one example of telling Romeo and Juliet using Alice 2.