Computer Programming through Animation using Alice

Bloomsburg University’s Summer Programs 2009

Exploring Emergence – Monday, July 6 through Thursday, July 16, 2009

Math and Science Summer Experience – Monday, July 13 through Thursday, July 16, 2009

Below are resource materials that I developed in 2009 for Bloomsburg University's outreach program for middle school students.  This year, the program was expanded to give students the choice between a four-day program (the Math and Science Summer Experience) and an eight-day program (Exploring Emergence). Each day, students rotated between different activities, spending 90 minutes in each activity.

NOTE: The resources below were used in the eight-day Exploring Emergence program. For the four-day Math and Science Summer Experience, we used Stories 1, 2, and 3, and the associated lesson plans. The concepts covered in these three sessions are fundamentally the same as those covered the previous year (see Computer Programming through Animation using Alice (2008)). The content was changed (i.e. we used different storylines) because some students from the previous summer had returned.

Alice handout for students and parents:  Word format PDF format

Pre workshop survey forms: Word 2007 format PDF format
Post workshop survey forms: 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
    Story 4: Word format PDF format
    Story 5: Students create their own animation/game.
Storyboard form: PowerPoint format PDF format  (Thank you, Wanda Dann, for this excellent idea!)

Lesson plans:
    Lesson Plan 1: Word 2007 format PDF format
    Lesson Plan 2: Word 2007 format PDF format
    Lesson Plan 3: Word 2007 format PDF format
    Lesson Plan 4: Word 2007 format PDF format
    Lesson Plan 5: Word 2007 format PDF format

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

Ideas for next summer:

• Provide each student with a folder for the handouts and a thumb drive for their worlds.  Collect them every day, 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 still thinking of creating a web page with links to a collection of safe web sites from which students can download sounds.