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

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 th...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: SIGCSE
• Authors: Susan H. Rodger, Jenna Hayes, Gaetjens Lezin, Henry Qin, Deborah Nelson, Ruth Tucker, Mercedes Lopez, Stephen Cooper, Wanda Dann, Don Slater
• Keywords: Alice Camps, Alice World, Basic Alice Concepts, Education, SIGCSE 2009