Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday | Friday
For my first day, I met with Professor Rodgers to go over the expectations for the summer, and to move into my office. While Alice was installing on my computer, I skimmed the preface and part of the first chapter of the Alice book. Then, I designed my webpage for this journal. Next, since I used Henry's webpage as a template for my own, I read over his journal to learn what he's done in the past two weeks. I read the same paper that Henry read on his first day, entitled "Alice: a 3-d tool for introductory programming concepts".
The paper proposes that Alice is an effective tool for the wide range of students enrolled in introductory CS courses. It addresses the major concerns of students' approaches to graphics, state, programming constructs, and event handling. Given my position as a UTA for CS1 with Professor Forbes (for the past several semesters,) I fully agree with the premise of this research. However, something I've observed is that many students in CS1 view the course as something they can't understand because they believe that they 'aren't that type of person.' Therefore, they approach their work incompletely because they've already decided they can't do it. One of my former students went on to take CS4 with Alice and told me that not only was she more successful in understanding the concepts, but she enjoyed the experience much more as well. For the rest of the day, I went through the Alice book, reading and completing some of the exercises in Chapters 1, 2 and 3 and Appendix A and B.
I started the day by going through Chapter 4 and 5, doing some of the exercises. After the lunch with the other CS summer interns, I took a break from Alice to read another article, entitled "Evaluating the Effectiveness of a New Instructional Approach." A two-year study found that when those students with little or no previous programming experience begin their study with an Alice course, they improved their performance and retention as CS majors. It would definitely be beneficial to complete this study with a larger sample size. I spent the rest of the day continuing the exercises in the book.
Today, I finished up chapter 6 and went through 7 and 8. I spent a lot of time on recursion. I read the article, "Tools for teaching introductory programming: what works ?" The paper is actually short panel statement about the tools that have been developed, focusing on narration, visualization and feedback. At the end of the article,the last panelist raised a good point regarding the difficulty of using a basic language, which is more limited. I've started to do some of the exercises in chapter 9.
This morning, I finished the exercise from yesterday in chapter 9. Then I read over Mercedes website and looked at the game she'd created. I looked over some of the assignments on Professor Rodgers page and decided to finish chapter 10 and complete one of the projects at the end of the book. Now that I've finished going through the book, I will spend some time on Monday completing a few of the classwork or assignments from the CPS 04 website.
I read the article: Developing Algorithmic thinking with Alice. The article focused on the necessity of alorigthmic thinking in terms of learning to program effectively. I found the article to be a very good description of Alice, proposing some of the benefits of Alice, including: feedback, enjoyment, the simplicity of 'state' and collaborative learning. Perhaps I should have read it at the beginning of the week. One of the things the article mentioned definitely stood out to me: the issue of collaborative learning.Iagree that collaboration is very effective and enjoyable, especially in a new learning environment. However, introductory Java students have a limited range of Java programs that new that they are equipped to write at the basic level. Thus, two issues are often raised with their collabortion: - is the work equally divided? And more importantly, are the concepts understood equally by both partners? Semester after semester, I've seen partners successfully collaborate on assignments, only to fall short alone, during the final. In my experience so far, the nature of Alice programming certainly seems to create a positive environmnent for collaborative learning.
On a similar subject, since I was nearly finished with the book, Henry and I also talked a good deal more than we have on previous days. We bounced ideas off of each other and hinted at a few suggestions in terms of working together next week. I think we both look forward to the rest of our team arriving.