Day One Blog

Today I completed the introductory Alice tutorials, read the Rodger SIGCSE 2012 paper, and (attempted to) set up my webpage. I am not sure why none of my HTML files are showing up on my domain at this time, but hopefully that gets figured out. I am excited to program in Alice, as it has a lot of interesting features that I wouldn't have expected.

As for the paper I read:

"Integrating Computing into Middle School Disciplines Through Projects"

Roger et al. 2012

SIGCSE February 29-March 3, 2012. Raleigh, NC, USA

    This paper summarized the previous four years of efforts to spread computer science to K-12 using Alice. In particular, it summarized the 2011 version of the two-week conference that we will be doing later this summer. It first went over the objectives of and reasons for this endeavor as a whole, and then went more in depth by describing the merits of several different programs used for a variety of disciplines. Most of these were meant for use as interactive lessons in math and science, although several were intended for presentation purposes only. Finally, the paper did some basic analysis of how different disciplines utilized all of the features that Alice has to offer, with the conclusion being that while math teachers used the most features, their programs tended to be less interactive, whereas technology teachers used far fewer features (as compared to the average for all disciplines), their programs tended to be quite interactive.

Day two.