Adventures in
Alice Programming
Durham, North Carolina Region
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.

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:
Read about our new NSF ITEST grant to continue this project from 2011-2016.
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 June 18-22,25-29. Teachers will be expected to return for a one week followup workshop in June 2013.
CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFORMATION and APPLYING FOR THE WORKSHOP
There will be a one-week workshop July 9-13, 2012 for teachers who attended our previous Alice workshops with preference towards those that attended the July 2011 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
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".
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.
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.
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.
In the summer of 2009, we ran several events.
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 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 .
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.
The Duke site has run continuously since 2008 from NSF funding and several IBM Faculty awards.
| 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. |