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 their free time.
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 their free time.
This paper describes the integration of the Alice 3D virtual worlds environment into many disciplines in elementary school, middle school and high school. We have developed a wide range of Alice instructional materials including tutorials for both computer science concepts and animation concepts. To encourage the building of more complicated worlds, we have developed template Alice classes and worlds. With our materials, teachers and students are exposed to computing concepts while using Alice to create projects, stories, games and quizzes. These materials were successfully used in the summers 2008 and 2009 in training and working with over 130 teachers.
For four years we have been integrating computing into a variety of middle school disciplines via the Alice programing language. Early on we focused on creating curriculum materials for teachers to use in teaching the basic programming and animation concepts. This paper describes our efforts over the past two years in creating model projects for students to build in all disciplines, and our most recent focus on science and mathematics projects. For science we have introduced experiments in Alice and the tools needed for them. In mathematics we have created projects to increase their understanding of programming and to use the projects to increase their understanding of mathematics. We also discuss our efforts in workshops to teach K-12 teachers Alice and an analysis of the teachers' lesson plans and worlds developed in the most recent workshop.
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