Adventures in
Alice Programming
Durham, North Carolina Region
Adventures in Alice Programming
Duke University, Durham, NC
Adventures in Alice Programming is a project for integrating the programming language Alice into middle schools and high schools in the state of NC, based in the Durham, NC region. Originally, the target schools were the schools in Durham county, Vance county, Person county and Chatham county. We have now expanded to schools throughout NC. We have also taken a few teachers from other states.
Free Alice materials for Use in K-12
Adventures In Alice Programming Duke Site by Computer Science
Professor Susan Rodger and the
Alice Team at Duke University is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
K-12 Alice materials we've developed:
Alice Teacher Lesson plans are here:
Alice Workshops
We run Alice Workshops every summer. Currently we are running three-week workshops (two-week workshop one summer and a one-week followup the following summer), with a new beginner workshop every summer. The current workshops are supported by an NSF ITEST Scale-up grant and IBM.
For more information about our Alice workshops, here is a 3 minute video of scenes from our 2012 workshop including interviews with teachers attending the workshop.
Thanks to Melissa Murphy for producing the video.Alice Symposium 2013
It's a special week of Alice activities the week of June 17-21, 2013. We hold an Alice Symposium every 3-4 years in addition to our regular workshops. The Third Alice Symposium will be held on June 19, 2013 with papers, posters and an Alice contest. There will be two-day workshops related to Alice before the symposium on June 17-18 and after the symposium on June 20-21, 2013.
Two-week Beginner Workshop for Summer 2013
We will be holding a two-week beginner workshop for teachers to learn Alice that will have funding for lodging and a small stipend, thanks to funding from NSF and IBM. Priority is for middle school and high school teachers from NC, though we have room for a few teachers from outside NC. The workshop will be held the two weeks July 8-12, 15-19, 2013 Teachers will be expected to return for a one week followup workshop in June 2014.
CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFORMATION and APPLYING FOR THE WORKSHOP
One-week Followup Workshop in Summer 2013
There will be a one-week workshop June 17-21, 2013 for teachers who attended our previous Alice workshops with preference towards those that attended the June 2012 workshop. Space permitting, additional teachers will be able to attend. This workshop is to present to other teachers how they are using Alice, to develop additional lesson plans and to hear about new Alice materials being developed.
CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFORMATION and APPLYING FOR THE WORKSHOP
News Articles about our project
Duke CS news article about workshop and pictures by Duke Photography on facebook - June 2012
Duke Chronicle article Alice Project to introduce children to computer science - June 22, 2011
Duke Today article Reviving Interest in Math and Science June 13, 2011
Duke Gist From The Mill article Reviving The Interest in Math and Science, p. 4, Spring 2011
Duke News made a video about our project on YouTube July 6, 2009.
An article appeared in Duke News on June 22, 2009. It got picked up lots of places such as Science Daily .
An article about this workshop and student camp appeared in Duke News on July 10, 2008. The article also appeared at wral.com and the Durham Herald News.
A blog about the project is on the www.instructify.com site under July 24, 2008 and titled "Adventures in Alice Programming Workshop at Duke University".
PAST Two-week Beginner Workshop for Summer 2012
We held a two-week beginner workshop for teachers to learn Alice June 18-22,25-29, 2012.
PAST One-week Followup Workshop in Summer 2012
There was a one-week workshop held July 9-13, 2012 for teachers who attended our previous Alice workshops.
PAST Two-day Followup Workshop in Summer 2011
We held an Alice Followup Workshop on June 22-23, 2011 at Duke. The purpose of this workshop was for teachers who attended a previous workshop to get together to present to other teachers how they are using Alice and to hear about new Alice materials being developed.
PAST Two-week Beginner Workshop in Summer 2011
We held a two-week beginner workshop for teachers to learn Alice with funding for lodging and a small stipend, thanks to funding from NSF and IBM. The workshop was held the two weeks July 11-15 and July 18-22. Teachers who attended are expected to return for a one week followup workshop in July 2012.
Past Workshops for Summer 2010
We held several beginner workshops for teachers to learn Alice, and several followup workshops for teachers who had already used Alice to continue to explore Alice.
- Beginners: June 14-June 18, 2010
- Followup: June 21-22, 2010
- Followup: July 6-7, 2010
- Beginners: July 12-July 16, 2010
- Beginner (part of Project Lead the Way): July 29-July 30, 2010
Past Workshops and Symposiums before 2010
In the summer of 2009, we ran several events.
- 2-day followup workshop on June 15-16, 2009 for teachers who attended the 2008 workshop.
- Alice Symposium held June 17, 2009 attended by over 120 people.
- Three one-week introductory Alice workshops for
new teachers. (workshop
2009 page)
- One week Alice workshop June 22-June 26
- One week Alice workshop June 28-July 2
- One week Alice workshop July 6-10
In summer 2008 we held a three-week workshop for teachers to learn Alice and to develop materials. The first week was training in Alice. The second week involved developing Alice curriculum materials and lesson plans with aid from Duke faculty and students. The third week was additional development of materials and some testing of materials on students attending one of two one-week summer camps on Alice for middle school kids (workshop 2008 page)
Workshops/Symposia held before 2008:
- Alice Symposium - June 19-21, 2006
- Alice Workshop - June 11-12, 2005
About Alice
Alice is a 3D virtual worlds programming environment that makes it easy to create animations for either story telling or interactive games. We have used Alice with 4th-6th grade students on up to high school students.
Students can use Alice to integrate computer science with any other discipline. Alice can be used in two ways, at the lower level students can learn enough Alice to build interactive worlds to integrate it into course modules, or at a higher level as a complete course on learning programming. In any current module in which a student creates a poster or presentation, the student now can build an interactive story or game as the presentation.
See other related Duke Alice materials here .
Alice is available for free. For more information see www.alice.org .
Participating Regions
The "Adventures in Alice Programming" project has NSF funding for 2011-2016 to focus on three states: NC, SC, and MS. The NC site will take a few teachers from other states each year.
The "Adventures in Alice Programming" project ran in six regions of the country, 2006-2009 funded by the National Science Foundation.
- Durham, North Carolina
- Virginia Beach, Virginia
- San Jose, California
- Denver, Colorado
- Charleston, South Carolina
- Oxford, Mississippi
The Duke site has run continuously since 2008 from NSF funding and several IBM Faculty awards.
Contact
Susan H. RodgerProfessor of the Practice
Department of Computer Science
LSRC Room D237, Box 90129
Duke University, Durham, NC 27708-0129
Phone: (919)-660-6595
Email: rodger@cs.duke.edu
Supporters
| This project is funded by the National Science Foundation, grants ESI-0624642 and DRL-1031351. Any opinions, finding and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. | |
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Additional funds have been provided by IBM to boost the number of teachers participating in the Durham region and to continue workshops in other years. |
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