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

Rodger, Susan H.; Hayes, Jenna; Lezin, Gaetjens; Qin, Henry; Nelson, Deborah; Tucker, Ruth; López, Mercedes Rodríguez; Cooper, Stephen; Dann, Wanda; Slater, Don

doi:10.1145/1539024.1508967

Cited by 26 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 10 publications

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“…Request permissions from permissions@acm.org. Technologies used in outreach programs include kinaesthetic activities such as Computer Science Unplugged [1], and visual programming environments such as Alice [10] and Scratch [7]. Robotics activities are very popular [3], because they reify the abstract behaviour of algorithms and programs as concrete artefacts that appeal to young people.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Teaching a core CS concept through robotics

Magnenat

Shin

Riedo

et al. 2014

Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Innovation &Amp; Technology in Computer Science Education - ITiCSE '14

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We implemented single-session workshops using the Thymio-II-a small, self-contained robot designed for young students, and VPL-a graphical software development environment based upon event handling. Our goal was to investigate if the students could learn this core computer science concept while enjoying themselves in the robotics context. A visual questionnaire was developed based upon the combined Bloom and SOLO taxonomies, although it proved difficult to construct a questionnaire appropriate for young students. We found that-despite the short duration of the workshop-all but the youngest students achieved the cognitive level of Unistructural Understanding, while some students achieved higher levels of Unistructural Applying and Multistructural Understanding and Applying.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Teaching a core CS concept through robotics

Magnenat

Shin

Riedo

et al. 2014

Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Innovation &Amp; Technology in Computer Science Education - ITiCSE '14

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“…From literature review we found that there is much interest in designing, building, testing and teaching with first programming environments and often the emphasis of studies is made on how effective the resulting environment is to convey computer science concepts and algorithms and at the same time how it is also fun and friendly to use, see for example [4]. There has been little, or null, attention paid to conclusive results yet we believe the preliminary data is promising and the effort worth continuing.…”

Section: Content and Claimsmentioning

confidence: 99%

From intuition to measure: Styles of use in Alice: Identifying patterns of use by observing participants in workshops with Alice

Díaz

Gaytán-Lugo

Fleck

2015

2015 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC)

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After several rounds of workshops on Computer Animation with Alice, a free platform for three dimensional computer animation created by Carnegie Mellon University, a pattern of styles of use was observed. Some attendants seemed to try to follow the instructions given and attempt to reproduce exactly the animation the instructor was creating. A second group concentrated on creating visually attractive scenes; a third one on inventing stories and putting models in the scene to talk to each other according to those stories. In the fourth group participants wanted to go well beyond the instructor explanations and explored features and functions of Alice by their own creating complex and action-rich animations. At some point the consistency of those observations lead us to attempt a systematic study by crafting a description of the styles and designing observation tools to detect them and measure the frequency of each one. In this showpiece we will recount the experience, describe in detail the styles observed and present the results of the systematic observation in order to receive suggestions for improvement. We hope to reflect with viewers on why the study of styles of use in Alice could be important for visual languages and computer science education.In this showpiece we will present four profiles of what we call "styles of use" that we detected over time in participants in computer animation workshops with Alice [1], a free environment for learning to program created by Carnegie Mellon University [3] which uses a block programming model to produce animations in a 3D space. After conducting several of such workshops we started noticing that participants engaged with the platform in one of four different styles: instruction follower (Fig. 2 left), scene designer (Fig. 2 center), dialogue storyteller (Fig. 2 right) and action animator (Fig. 3).In an attempt to validate our observations we designed a survey for participants and a form for an observer to fill for each participant and tested both instruments in one workshop, the results were highly revealing although the number of participants and the setting of the experiment were less than optimal.In the test run we found that the four styles appeared in an interesting mix. Grouping data from participants according to sex, age, previous knowledge of computer programming and degree to which the participant liked Alice, several interesting 978-1-4673-7457-6/15/$3\.00 ©2015 IEEE features appeared. For example, the instruction follower style is much more popular among adults than in teenagers, women had a higher incidence in the dialogue storyteller style and the action animator did not show among those that liked Alice less than the maximum mark. With limited data it is hard to make any generalization but we hope it serves as a starting point for discussion and analysis. We plan to continue with the research in order to fmd if the identified styles appear consistently across time, diversity of participants, and events, if the descriptions of the styles are clear enough ...

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“…Alice 3D has been used successfully [21], integrating computing within the context of a wide variety of subjects such as math, science, and language arts [20], and to help students understand what their future careers in computing might look like [27]. Scratch programming has also been used extensively [4,15,23], including with students with disabilities [1], urban youth [16], or particular underrepresented groups [10].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

CS principles goes to middle school

Buffum

Martinez-Arocho

Frankosky

et al. 2014

Proceedings of the 45th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education

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Spurred by evidence that students' future studies are highly influenced during middle school, recent efforts have seen a growing emphasis on introducing computer science to middle school learners. This paper reports on the in-progress development of a new middle school curricular module for Big Data, situated as part of a new CS Principles-based middle school curriculum. Big Data is of widespread societal importance and holds increasing implications for the computer science workforce. It also has appeal as a focus for middle school computer science because of its rich interplay with other important computer science principles. This paper examines three key aspects of a Big Data unit for middle school: its alignment with emerging curricular standards; the perspectives of middle school classroom teachers in mathematics, science, and language arts; and student feedback as explored during a middle school pilot study with a small subset of the planned curriculum. The results indicate that a Big Data unit holds great promise as part of a middle school computer science curriculum.

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

Cited by 26 publications

References 10 publications

Teaching a core CS concept through robotics

Teaching a core CS concept through robotics

From intuition to measure: Styles of use in Alice: Identifying patterns of use by observing participants in workshops with Alice

CS principles goes to middle school

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