Computer Programming through Animation with Alice

Bloomsburg University’s Summer Experience 2008

Monday, July 14 through Thursday, July 17, 2008

Below are resource materials that I developed in 2008 for Bloomsburg University's Math & Science Summer Experience, an outreach program for middle school students. The four-day program consisted of three classes, with each class having a 90 to 120 minute session each day. My class was titled "Computer Programming through Animation using Alice" and I'm pleased to say that it was very well received.

Alice handout for students and parents: Word format    PDF format

Lesson plans (annotations made as the week progressed are in red):
    Day 1: Word 2007 format PDF format
    Day 2: Word 2007 format PDF format
    Day 3: Word 2007 format PDF format
    Day 4: Word 2007 format PDF format

Story handouts for students:
    Story 1: Word format PDF format
    Story 2: Word format PDF format
    Story 3: Word format PDF format
    Storyboard form: PowerPoint format PDF format (Thank you, Wanda Dann, for this excellent idea!)

Sample worlds (based on our story outline): .zip file format (download and extract)

Ideas for next summer:

Each student should have a folder for the handouts. I'll collect them every day as I did the thumb drives, with the students taking them home on the last day.
Adding sound is fun, but I didn't have any sounds handy for the students to use. Allowing them to surf the web for free .wav files would not be wise for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the time it would waste. I'm thinking of creating a web page with links to a collection of safe web sites from which students can download sounds.
We're talking about expanding the program, e.g. a 2- or 4- week version. There's so much more we could with the additional time, both content-wise (e.g. conditions and while loops, recording dialog, adding properties to objects, more robust event handling) and format-wise (e.g. we could have weekly "animation fairs" where students present their work). If there's enough interest, it would be nice to have an advanced Alice class for those who took this year's class.