June 2nd, 2008
I downloaded Alice onto my laptop last night before starting work this morning
Upon arrival this morning I began refreshing myself with Alice. I went through all 4
tutorials at the beginning of the Alice and skimmed over a few sections of the book.
thoughts and comments:After reviewing Arrays in Alice I am beginning to realize that I need to spend alot more time on arrays.
I created an Alice world which Sucessfully remastered the Array Visualization, however I still need to review the actual array without the visualizationaspect.
After playing around with Alice for most of the morning I turned to the articles on the website.
Some questions that came up as I was reading the paper:
Why would it be beneficial to make Computer Science seem more like Math?
Are there any fields of study (besides statistics) that would complement Computer Science particularly nicely, or not at all?
For the first day I read the first aerticle on the possibilites that Computer Science provides for exploring fields such as social networking,
June 3rd, 2008
I arrived at work at 8 a.m. this morning with a team meeting scheduled for 10 a.m. I decided to
devote the first two hours of the day to reading my daily article and working on my webjournal.
Today I read the article entitled " Developing Algorithmic Thinking with Alice". Alice does a good job of
teaching logical and algorithmic types of thinking in a fun and interactive enviroment. During my own Alice class I often found myself
spending extra time then neccesary on Alice worlds because I liked perfecting them to my satisfaction. The only worry that I have with Alice
is that at times it can be too general. I feel if Alice catered a bit more to teaching a real programming langauge like JAVA or C++ the transition
would be a little less painful.
After reading the article I began looking through the Alice book and discussing with my comrads what would be the best area to focus on for today.
I decided to begin a world as shown on page 175 of the Alice manual, incorporating different language learning techniques through Alice.
I think this will be an excellent way to demonstrate to teachers the diversity of subjects that can be covered by the Alice program.
June 4th, 2008
Today was very busy. I wanted to finish working on my vehicle property and inheritance tutorial and that
consumed most of my day. The group had a two and 1/2 hour lunch session with several of the professors
today so sadly I did not get around to reading one of Lopez's articles. I will pick that back up tomorow.
The Tutorial is almost finished. I had two workmates look over it and offer suggestions. I only have a
few gliches to iron out. I plan to have it completed and uploaded by midmorning tomorow. I also will
begin work on the subject topic example worlds tomorow.
June 5th, 2008
Today we had another meeting with professor Rodger at 10. I worked on finishing my vehicle property and inheritance tutorial for the first two hours
of work. Professor Rodger critiqued the tutorial and I reworked it. After a few more crititques from my workmates I think the tutorial and adjacent
example world are ready for the website. Henry and I uploaded the worlds and power point onto the final website with links and directory information
to everything. Next I read the next article in the Mercedes lopez series entitled, " Tools for Teaching Introductory Programing: What Works".
The article talks about projects like Alice being especially useful for drawing girls to the Compsci major because they see it as " Programming
With a purpose."This combined with the simple syntax makes compsci a little less scary and a little more appealing to people who aren't born with
the nerd gene. I think this was a good point to make and one that I mentioned the first article was lacking. After reading the article I spent the rest
of the day working on my first subject topic world which is an interactive spanish quiz,using a western desert setting and several animals.
June 6th, 2008
Today I finished working on my first subject topic example world and loaded it onto my Duke webspace for now.My goal with these example worlds is to demonstrate to
the teachers the wide diversity of subjects that can be enhanced through the Alice program. Thus my first world was a spanish quiz. I created an interactive
quiz which allowed students to learn the names, in spanish of 4 different desert animals.
I then turned to an exploration of Egypt, as a new world. Professor Rodger talked about this as a good example so I decided to flesh it out.
I finished about 2/3 of the world today and hope to finish it on Monday.
I also read an article on the Mercedes Lopez site entitled, "ALICE: A 3-D Tool For Introductory Programming Concepts"
The point of this article was to stress the importance of visualization in the beginning stages of learning Computer Science.
I think this is a legitimate point, especially for children. Visualization allows the student to see right away what he is trying to
accomplish and exactly what is going wrong with his code. However, I still feel Alice is missing a step. I think it is still a leep to
go from Alice to JAVA. Yes students know the visualization, but have a hard time with the more abstract thinking that JAVA requires.
I think this problem could be solved by teaching more abstract concepts like Arrays (not the visualization kind) in Alice. I am not sure
how this would be accomplished, but someone should figure it out! :-D
June 9th, 2008
Today I finshed the Egypt tutorial for my second subject topic world. I plan on making three in total.
I am happy with the first two. The third world is a marine setting, based off the fish School from "Finding Nemo".
It is an interactive math quiz. I think that the three worlds together will do a good job of demonstrating the diversity
of the program to the teachers at the Alice camp. I plan to be done with this project tomorow and have all three worlds
uploaded to the website. I also reviewed a tutorial for Deborah and we took headshots for the website.
I also read another article on the Mercedes Lopez site entitled, " Teaching Objects -first in Introductory Computer
Science".The article discussed the new approach that Alice offers for novice students to begin learning Computer Science through
object oriented teaching methods.The idea is to teach the basic tools of computer science through spatial reasoning and object
orientation, rather simply through math and abstract ideas. Alice is the physical manifestation of that idea. I think the idea will catch on
once the next few versions of Alice has come out and the bugs have been ironed out.
I spent the rest of the day working on my fish world in preparation to load this section in the morning.
June 10th, 2008
I finished the "Finding Nemo" math example this morning and loaded all three subject topic worlds onto the main website. The Math Example is an
interactive addition lesson, in which the fish will respond depending on whether or not the the player gets the math problem right. The second
example is a spanish quiz which teaches the player the names of four different desert animals, in a quiz type setting. The final example is for
history and it is a tour of ancient Egypt. This final world is not interactive but rather an animation that teaches various aspects about the Egyptian
civilization. After finishing and uploading these worlds to the main webspace I read the next article in the Mercedes Lopez series, entitled "Using
visualization to teach recursion". Honestly, I am not sure that Alice really teaches recursion well. I never really understood recursion when I was taking
Alice and I still don't think I have a perfect grasp on it from the article. Thus I am not sure I am the best person to comment on this article.
After updating my webjournal I spent the rest of the day working on a tutorial for Lists and Arrays.
June 11th, 2008
Today was really busy so sadly I did not get the chance to read another article from the Mercedes Lopez
article series. I kept working on my tutorial for Arrays and Lists. The tutorial is pretty long but I
wanted to make sure that I covered it really well. Tomorow I will have my co-workers review it and
load it along with the example world onto the main website. I also worked a little bit more on the
adjacent example world to see go along with the Arrays and Lists tutorial. We had our regular wednesday
afternoon conference and lunch session with the whole group and listened to a very interesting talk
on preparing for grad school. The group offered some suggestions to Professor Forbbes for suture speakers
Upon coming back to work we headed to the main classroom in the LSRC to test out the computers. We found
that Alice 2.0, 2.2, and Scratch works on all of them but Story Telling Alice doesn't work on any of
them. We will need to fix this problem before the camp begins.
June 12th, 2008
We are nearing the end of our first session in Alice. The camp starts on Monday. Today I spent most of the day working on my Arrays and Lists
tutorial. It needed a lot of work to get it to a level that kids and teachers with out experience could understand. Jenna and I worked through it for
a couple hours today, rebuilding it step by step. I also spent time ironing out the kinks to my links so I could put them on this webpage. Professor
Rodger came by and talked to us today about starting the camp on Monday. We finished checking the laptops and decided not to try to use Alice 2.2 for the camp.
Well this entry was short but hopefully I have a much wider knowledge of HTML today and have made significant progress on the Arrays and Lists Tutorial.
June 13th, 2008
Today I put the finishing touches on the Arrays and Lists tutorial. I had Deborah download the powerpoint
and build the world based soley off my slides. From her comments and suggestions I think the powerpoint is ready
to put up now. I loaded the finished world, the powerpoint, and a starter world all onto the main webpage.The starter world
contains only the characters from the Example world. There is no code. It is just to download so it is easier to get started.
I also began working on the Antarctic science world for Professor Rodger. It is turning out to be quite the project.
Professor Rodger came by and we spent a while talking about how things will go down on Monday. It sounds like it will be a
pretty eventful week.
June 16th, 2008
Today we began the Alice camp.Most of the teachers arrived by 9:30 and we began to do introductions. Some of the
questions have been suprosingly difficult to answer. I did not get much time to work on the science example world
I found that alot of the teachers were asking questions that we hadn't covered yet. I was confused as to wheather
or not I should answer them or tell them to wait for the instruction. For the rest of the day I simply walked around
helping people and answered as many questions as I could.I think the first day in any class with a new group of people is
the most rocky and the most frustrating. I hope that as the teachers get more comfortable with Alice they will be less
frustrated and more able to see the possibilities that the program presents.
June 17th, 2008
Today we continued to teach the teachers Alice. I am starting to see that mornings are going much better than afternoons.
The teachers seem really eager to learn the program but I feel that they are frustrated at the pace we are going. I also
noticed that when many of the teachers have a huge problem like their computer crashes or their world gets deleted they are
often not quick to raise their hand and say something. Many of the teachers were having technical problems like this and thus
by the time they restarted Alice they were so far behind the lecture that we had to start over. Maybe we should tell the teachers
to not be afraid to raise their hands if they have a major problem like this. Besides this I feel that we got alot accomplished today
despite afternoon frustrations. I can see some of the teachers are really getting excited about the possibilities of the program. Our
task tomorow will be to try to bring the teachers that are struggling, up to the level of everybody else.
June 18th, 2008
Today was the third day of teacher camp for the Alice project. Today seemed to run much smoother, with less tension than
yesterday. We had a small demo period where teachers could demonstrate some of the stuff that they have been
working on. The teachers are also starting to get much more spread out in terms of understanding with Alice. Some of them
are way ahead of the class and already doing If/Else statements while others are struggling to keep up with class verses world
methods. HOwever, I think all of the teachers seemed to be doing better today and the general mood was amiable. When I was not helping
teachers with their projects today I continued to work on my Antarctic science exploration. I have added a key control event so that
when the eskimo gets into the canoe the person watching the animation can control the movement of the canoe by pressing the arrow keys.
Tomorow I will work on the penguin section of the world. We also had our weekly wednesday group lunch today, which was nice, however Jenna
and I came back before the lecture started to keep helping the teachers. And now it is the end of another Alice day :-D.
June 19th, 2008
Today the teachers learned parameters. I was pleasantly surprised as most of them picked it up rather quickly. The concept was much easier to teach
than I expected it to be. I think the main problem was that the example given was the band member example. The teachers needed to know "Part named
key to make that world work correctly. However, most of them didn't know it from the tutorial. We might want to go over this as a class tomorow.
I have also finished the hard parts of my Antarctic worl. It should just need some dialogue and a few things smoothed out. I hope to finish
it completley tomorow morning and demo it for the class tomorow afternoon.
June 20th, 2008
I finished the Arctic world today and demonstrated it to the class afte lunch. I started a new world about a tutorial on the international
space station during the afternoon. I intend to work on it next week while helping the teachers throug their second week. The teachers are
learning well. Great week.
June 23rd, 2008
I was late to work today due to a doctors appointment. However, I heard that the teachers learned random number generators today.
I spent most of the day working on an example world for "Light". The teachers requested it and there is not much in about it in the
book. Thus I spent most of the day playing around with light to see what I can do with it. I think I have a good idea light now. I will
turn my example world into a tutorial on light tomorow. I hope to have the lesson ready for the teachers by wednesday.
June 24th, 2008
June 25th, 2008
Today the teachers learned the "Click a Cow" game and we spent the morning helping them with that.
I spent most of the day working on my "light tutorial." I haven't finished it yet but it should
be up by Friday evening. I will not be in to work tomorow so there will not be another
journal entry till friday.
June 27th, 2008
Today the teachers had their final lesson. They gave us thank you cards which we all thought was really cool. Professor Rodger demo'd "scratch" and a
few other random things that the teachers were asking about. This is the last day of the teachers conference. I also finished my "Light" tutorial. It
is ready to load onto the repository page, Monday morning. I spent the rest of the day working on my space ship educational tour.
June 30th, 2008
Today will be a short week so the team began preparing for the kids camp on Monday. I had started a space exploration world which I worked on for the
first part of the morning. I was having dificulty with the world so I switched to another example world which I thought would be better for the
girls, coming to the camp, to work with. It is a ballerina world in which I have preprogramed several methods to make the ballerina dance. The girls
can call the preprogrammed methods in any order they would like to make the ballerina dance. Later on in the week they can learn how to program their own
dancing methods and how to use lists to make several ballerinas dance. Tomorow, Jenna and I are starting on a tutorial for the camp on several basics.
We are going to cover the he-builder and she-builder, camera control and a few basic methods. This should keep us occupied tomorow.
July 1st, 2008
Today I had a doctors appointment so I did not get as far along as I had hoped. I finished the ballerina world so that the kids can use it to get a basic
idea of how to tell a story with methods. Jenna and I sat down and wrote up an outline for the introduction tutorial for the kids camp. I also completed
the example world to go along with the tutorial. It has a boy and a girl, each from the he/builder she/builder category. I build a few simple methods for
them. I have a "cartweel" and an "answer cell phone" method for the girl and a "get on horse" method for the boy. I will write up the tutorial tomorow.
July 2nd, 2008
Today it was our groups turn to present at Wednesday lunch, so we all picked worlds to show and explain. The presentation went well. Jenna and I
had a meeting with Professor Rodger about the first half of the slideshow that we are putting together for the kids. We worked on the second part for
the rest of the afternoon. We are almost through the methods section and will show it to Professor Rodger in the morning. We plan to have the whole
done by this time tomorow.
July 3rd, 2008
Today was very busy. Jenna and I spent most of the day getting the tutorials ready for the kids camp on Monday. We have all three parts loaded onto
a new webpage, which is linked to the Repository. All three parts are also divided up into PDF's, Handouts on powerpoint and Example Worlds.
Henry and I also loaded my example world on light and the tutorial that goes with it onto the Repository page. we also loaded the Antarctic world
example and the Ballerina world example under the "example world" category on the repository page. I spent the last hour of the day critiquing the
ballerina world.
July 7th, 2008
Today was the beginning of the kids camp for the Alice project. We have 16 kids this first week and most of them seem to be catching on
pretty fast. They seem interested in it and eager to do more with the program. Jenna and I spent the entire day going through the first
tutorial with them. We still have the end of part 2 and all of part 3 to do. The biggest problem that I forsee is the amount of skill level
difference, between the kids. I think some of them are moving on way before the teachers while others are struggling to keep up.
We need to find a way to synchronize the learning enviroment.
July 8th, 2008
Today was the second of the kids camp. I forgot to mention that the teachers learned Lists ans Arrays yesterday and did very well with it.
Jenna and I finished the Main tutorial today. The kids now know all of the basics of Alice, including Camera Control, loops and events. After
a long walk to Cameron Stadium we had lunch and the kids were given the afternoon to watch some of the demo worlds that we had created and to work
on their own world.
July 9th, 2008
The camp went well today. The kids demoed their worlds for the teachers. I am very impressed with how fast they are picking up the program.
I spent most of the day helping kids and one or two teachers who needed help. We also went to the Duke store today for our field trip.
My biggest accomplishment for the day was to secure us a private tour of Cameron Indoor Stadium tomorow. Yay me :-D.
July 10th, 2008
I had to leave early for a doctor's appointment today, but the camp went well. I began work on a new world that a teacher requested.
I also spent a good part of the day helping teachers and kids with their worlds. Finally, I took the kids on a tour of Cameron Indoor
Stadium.
July 11th, 2008
July 14th, 2008
Today was the first day of the second kid's camp. We have more kids then last week but they seem to be progressing faster than the
first week's kids did. This might be that we have already run the camp for a wekk and thus know how to run it better. I am not sure.
Jenna and I spent most of the day going through our three part tutorial with the kids. For the last two hours the kids worked on their own
worlds. Unfortunatley it was raining all day so we could not take the kids for their walk. However, we are planing on taking them to the chapel
tomorow. I think this will be a good week.
July 15th, 2008
I taught the Lists and Arrays tutorial to the second group of teachers today. The kids seem to be picking up the program very quickly.
They now know how to do events and lists. I am looking forward to seeing their worlds tomorow. We also took a field trip to the gardens today.
The teachers and the students seemed to really enjoy it. The kids spent the afternoon working on their worlds for demo day tomorow. Thier worlds
are much more involved and complicated than the worlds from last week, so they had a lot of questions. The TA's spent the afternoon
helping the kids. I also continued work on my faire wonderland.
July 16th, 2008
Today went well. We had wednesday lunch in North building. We took the kids on a tour of Cameron Indoor Stadium and they spent most of
their day working on their worlds. The kids that were ready, demoed their worlds. The rest plan to demo them on Friday. I spent the day
helping the kids with their worlds and working more on my fairie wonderland world.
July 17th, 2008
Today the kids learned a bunch of random followup stuff. They learned "Click a Cow, Importing Sound, and switching scenes. We took
them on a tour of the chapel and the Duke store. The kids spent the entire afteroon perfecting their worlds for tomorow's demonstration.
We spent the day helping them. I also continued work on my faire world and created a ballerina world of just the TA's faces :-D.
July 18th, 2008
Today was the last day of the kids camp. The kids demoed their worlds for the parents and took the wrap- up exam. I think the parents
really enjoyed their children's work. We also went on a final walk to the Duke football stadium. They were having a track meet so the
the kids enjoyed watching that.We helped the kids work on their worlds all morning and watched them during the afternoon. I also worked
on my fairie world, in Alice, during the animations. This is the end of all the camps. Monday we will begin our wrap-up work. This is
als0 Henry's last day. Good-bye Henry.
July 21st, 2008
Today was the first day of the three week wrap - up work. Professor Rodger had a long list of stuff for us to do to finish off the Alice
project for the summer. Thus the remaining four people on the team spent most of the day tackling the list. We divided up the list on the
whiteboard. I spent the day working on tutorials. I fixed two of my old tutorials, (I changed the background color, simplified a few points,
stuff like that.) Jenna and I worked on part 4 of the introductory tutorials. I focused on events, animated 3-D text and Billboards.
I am also building a world that demonstrates all the different types of events in one world. Since I have never used many of these events, I
spent a good part of the day testing them out. I have the world close to done and hope to start the tutorial for it tomorow.
July 22nd, 2008
I spent the morning working on the events tutorial for the repository page. Jenna and I also worked on part 4 of the intro tutorial for
the repository page. Professor Rodger had several corrections to parts 1-3 of the intro tutorial, so Jenna spent most of the day working
on that.I tackled the new tutorial for 3rd grade. We are presenting this tutorial to a new kids camp on Thursday so I was in a hurry to get it
done. The tutorial is much bigger than I currently anticipated and stands right now at about 57 slides. I anticipate it being over 60 by the
the time I am done. I plan on having the first draft finished, first thing tomorow morning. It will probably need to be cut down, so I should
be working on it most of tomorow.
July 23rd, 2008
I finished the tutorial for the 3rd grade kids camp tomorow first thing this morning and sent it to Professor Rodger. It was 63 slides long.
While I waited for her corrections I continued work on my Events tutorial. Professor Rodger got back to me with the corrections by 11 and I
spent the rest of the day getting the tutorial ready for printing. We had wednesday group lunch today, which took longer than expected. Thus
I didn't fully finish until 3:30. The tutorial is 80 slides in total but I think it explains the beginning concepts well. I spent the last
hour of the day working on my Events tutorial.
July 24th, 2008
I worked on my events tutorial all morning. At 12:40, Professor Rodger picked us up to go to Durham Academy to teach Alice to the Scratch camp.
I like the smart screen they had :-). The kids really liked Alice but I feel like alot of it was above their heads. As we walked around, most of
them were simply placing a lot of objects in their worlds and not really coding them. However, I still think it was a good idea to expose them
to the program. Hopefully when they get up to 5th grade they will be able to code more extensively. We stayed at Durham Academy untill 3:40 and
then called it a day.
July 25th, 2008
My events tutorial is almost complete.The main trouble has been creating a world that can utilize all of the events that are in Alice, in one
world. I finished it this morning and had deborah go through it. She had several suggestions which I have been working on. I need to add one more
event and add some screenshots and the tutorial should be finished. I also corrected the "light" tutorial. It is ready to upload to the
repository page. Professor Rodger prepared us for data gathering today. It looks like next week will be spent going through allof the work
that was done by kids during the kids camp to gather data points.
July 28th, 2008
Today we started major data collecting from the kids camp. The process is looking pretty long and arduous. I gathered all the data from two
kids today. The spreedsheet on google is not quite finished yet so I didn't get a chance to upload it to the database, however I have all of
the info. I had to leave early for a doctor's appointment today but I spent the remainder of the day prepping the next kid's world for data
gathering.
July 29th, 2008
We did data collection from the kids camp all day today. Once I am done with the kid I am currently working on we will have 5 left till we
are done. We hope to be done before the group lunch tomorow.
July 30th, 2008
Today we finished the data gathering. Gaetjins still needs to finish inputing it into the database but I think it should be completely ready for
analysis by tomorow. We spent the rest of the day working on correcting the tutorials. Tomorow I plan on finishing the tutorial corrections and
helping with the analysis of the database. We also had our last wednesday group lunch today. Which is very sad.
July 31st, 2008
I finished part 4 of the opening tutorial this morning and sent it to Professor Rodger for final corrections. The Arrays and Lists tutorial
needed a lot of work so I have spent practically the entire day trying to fix it. Jenna and Deborah both reviewed it and I think I have it
just about complete. I will finish the last couple slides tomorow morning and send it to Professor Rodger for final corrections. I also
spent part of the afternoon helping Gaetjins figure out how to organize the data into tables. The data should hopefully be ready by the
end of work tomorow.
August 1st, 2008
I finished the second version of the Arrays and Lists tutorial and sent it to Professor Rodger for more corrections, along with the updated
world. I also finished part 4 of the intro tutorial. It is now up on the website although we do not have a link to it yet. I finished the
corrections to the vehicle tutorial and sent it to Professor Rodger for final approval. Professor Rodger took the group out to lunch today
since it is Deborahs last day.We had a lot of fun. When we got back I spent the rest of the time fixing my antarctic world so that it had
instructions in it. Good-bye Deborah! We will all miss you<3.
August 4th, 2008
This is the last week so we are all doing wrap up work. I got to work late this morning, as I had a doctor's appointment. I spent most of the
day working on the Ballerina world. I am having a hard time finishing the solo for the two lead dancers as I discovered that they have seperate
parts then the original ballerinas I coded. Thus most of the parameters are useless. I have added several complicated loops and done a bit of
the final solo. I hope to finish it tomorow.
August 5th, 2008
I finished the ballerina world today and sent it to Professor Rodger for final approval, before posting it on the website. That took all morning
and a good part of the afternoon. I spent the rest of the afternoon helping Jenna to refine Henry's tutorials so that they are comprehensible to
middle school students. I am currently working on turning his tutorial on spacial reasoning into a powerpoint presentation with easier to understand
explanations.
August 6th, 2008
This morning, Professor Rodger sent me the Ballerina world with some camera changes. I fixed them and sent it back to her for final approval.
After that I pulled up the material to workd on Henry's spacial reasoning tutorial. Then Alice crashed on me and I spent a long time figuring
out what was wrong with it. I finally had to delete Alice from my computer and reinstall it from the website. After I installed it I finished
the tutorial and gave it to Gaetjens to load onto the repository. we also went on a secret field trip for Professor Rodger which took some time.
Tomorow I will start on Henry's scene changing tutorial.
August 7th, 2008
Professor Rodger sent us an e-mail this morning, saying that she wanted more graphs and paragraph explanations for her paper. Gaetjens and I spent
the morning dividing up the types of objects used between guys and girls. We had the graph finished by noon. I spent the rest of the day working on
fixing Henry's Euripides and HUmvee tutorial. I almost have it completed. Tomorow I plan on finishing that tutorial and putting it up the repository
page. I will also probably start his variables tutorial although Jenna will most likely have to finish it as tomorow is my last day.
August 8th, 2008
Well today is my last day. Unfortunately it started with some mishaps. Alice crashed on my computer again and after a complete reinstall and
three attempts to load it I simply had to give up. Thus I used one of the school laptops to finish Henry's tutorial. Henry used two worlds in
this tutorial so I had to add all the slides for the second world to the powerpoint from yesterday. I finished it up and sent it to Gaetjens
to put on the repository. I spent the rest of the day starting one of the last two of Henry's tutorials that need to be updated. I gave what I
had to Jenna to finish up at the beginning of next week. I turned in my keys, filled out my final timecard and have now entered my last journal
entry. So long everybody! Thanks Professor Rodger for a great internship!!
Downoad Arrays and Lists Tutorial
Starter World For Arrays and Lists Tutorial