7/24

I'm running out of stuff to post about these days! Still working on the same old stuff, hopefully I'll be done with this intro tutorial soon

7/23

Today I met with Dr. Rodger on all of the worlds and tutorials I've made so far. I spent a lot of time going through all of those and fixing up to make sure they're right. Over the next few days I need to be making videos of my worlds and continuing to write the Princess Dragon tutorial.

7/20

Today I did a lot of work on the letters we're going to be sending out to teachers, almost finished up. I also split the Princess Dragon tutorial into parts. I plan on this one having three parts as opposed to the old four

7/19

Today I began creating the tutorial for the new princess dragon world. So far I finished part one. I also began looking through teacher worlds to write suggestion letters, which turns out to take a lot more time than I had originally thought. I'll be working on both of these things for the next few days.

7/18

Today I started making a new Princess Dragon world, as well as make a few of the utility objects I talked about yesterday

7/17

Today I put a lot of work into shortening down the original Princess Dragon tutorial. Unfortunately, we just decided to remake the tutorial from scratch, but this work will at least provide a good outline for what we should be doing in the new one. I also had the idea of providing some utility objects through the website, such as timers, and a screen fader. I'm sure there are some other good ideas for objects out there, I need to remember to keep an eye out for good ones to make.

7/16

Today is the first day back from our second workshop, so we spent some time looking at and posting the teacher worlds and lesson plans. I also began work on shortening down the Princess & Dragon tutorial to be less tedious and quicker to work through. I also worked briefly to fix up a teacher's world from last week's workshop.

7/4

The first part of the day went into cleaning up the html we added yesterday to the teacher world's site, and making sure all the links were up and correct. After that, I got back to my Alice worlds. I've been working on cleaning up and improving some of my worlds I have been working on for a while, and also creating some new ones. I should have at least some good new material to demo at next weeks' workshop.

7/3

I spent a lot of today going through teacher's lesson plans from the past couple weeks. I was asking a few questions as I looked through the worlds, some as simple as which were complete, and some more involved, such as what research questions should we be thinking about when looking at these worlds.

Although some lesson plans were incomplete or flawed, most were good, some very impressive. All of those should be up on the Alice workshop site by the end of the day. I encountered a few lesson plans that would make for good demos in next week's workshop.

7/2

Today is the fist day back at work after the workshop. The workshop went well, I look forward to getting a closer look at all of the lesson plans made by the teachers. Helping out with the workshop taught me a few things about how Alice is getting integrated into schools. One thing that I noticed (and I really think we need to work on) is that many teachers seem to treat Alice as a tool they can use to create eduactional programs. This is the same type of problem I've noticed in a lot of our existing tutorials : they expect little programming from the student, just use of a program created by the teacher. That being said, some teachers really did come up with good ideas on how to use Alice to incorporate programming concepts into their classrooms. I guess it can be tough to incorporate coding into English and Social Studies classes.

If there's anything I would try to include more of in future workshops, it would be more of an emphasis on encouraging the type of lesson plan that involves students creating/editing their own Alice worlds. As it is, I noticed some teachers feeling almost discouraged to create lesson plans like this. This was likely for a few reasons, but I think a big one is that a lesson plan that involves a lot of student coding can seem very sparse when you are eventually expected to present the lesson plan. This makes teachers inclined to over-do their end of the coding, just to make it seem as though they've done something.

The workshop was a great experience though, and I look forward to seeing some teachers come in who already have been using Alice in their classrooms.

6/15

I came up with a few more "challenges" today that I think will all be great simple additions to the Alice repository. One focuses on the Pythagorean theorem and trigonometry. I also improved the tic-tac-toe challenge from yesterday to generate more believable random boards. I will soon be creating the slides/writeups for these challenges so that they can be looked over by the group and put up.

6/14

I worked a lot today on some of the concepts I discussed in yesterday's post. I created a world where a tic tac toe board is randomly generated. The student's challenge is to check all of the rows and diagonals to see who has won the game, if anyone. This is a great example of the challenges I was referring to yesterday because it comes with a world that already generates the board for the student. Their task is just to create a single function which fits into the already-created structure of the world. More challenges and ideas like this to come.

6/13

Today I worked a little bit more on the asteroids project with Michael, which remains frustrating due to collision detection issues.

Concerning projects of my own, I had another realization today of resources I should be working to create. As I mentioned in some earlier posts, I really want to put a focus on the coding-side of Alice projects as far as students learning. Many existing tutorials are great in the concepts they cover, but almost all of them are organized in such a way that a student using them could just turn their brain off and copy exactly what they say. This obviously is not ideal if our goal is to be really teaching kids computational skills.

One beautiful feature that many tutorials have is a "Challenges" section at the end, giving the student some further options (without instructions) that they could develop if they wanted. This is what spawned my idea today: Why not have Alice worlds which are ONLY challenges. There would be no step-by-step instructions, just a few resources to get the student started. These would be things like:

• A brief description of the problem/challenge
• A description on what resources are given to them
• Hints on how they can go about solving the problem

This is basically the same type of problem that you see in many intro Computer Science classes at the college and high-school level: some given complex code, with a very specific method or function that the student is meant to edit to make work right. I am surprised to see that (as far as I can tell), Duke's Alice Repository doesn't currently offer any resources like this. In my opinion, it would be worth opening up an entire sub-section of the site for Challenges such as what I've just described.

I will be working the next few days to develop some of these challenges to serve as examples to what I'm talking about.

6/12

We got in a request from Rodger today hoping for a tutorial for some sort of game, based on interest from a few kids. We looked over one of the only existing "game" Alice worlds, called Ninja Mario", but decided after looking at it that we would be better off creating a simpler, less glitchy game. So me and Michael Marion began work on an Asteriods clone. What we have at this point actually looks and plays a lot like the original. Unfortunately, there are some major problems that we are going to have trouble ever solving. Most importantly, collision detection is near impossible in Alice. We have code that checks distances and should be working fine, but instead it only works very unreliably. There really is no other way to do this.
Pretty much all games require collision detection in order to work. There are a lot of suggestions I have come up with that I would give to the Alice development team, but one of the biggest I think is built in collision detection. With that functionality (for example, a function that follows the pattern [object] colliding with [object]), Alice would be so much more open to create games with. As of now, it can still only handle relatively simple scripts. We will continue working on this project, and almost definitely finish, tomorrow.

6/11

Today all three of us came to a finish on the tutorials we had been working on, so we all spent some time reading each others' and giving each other some advice. I definitely think my tutorial is ready to be reviewed by Rodger.
As I mentioned yesterday, I'm really trying lately to create worlds that are simple and focus on just one or a few concepts in coding them. In that vein, I worked on my barely-started "bird graphing" and made it into a relatively complete graphing world. I should make a tutorial for this soon. It's a great example of the worlds I want to be creating: simple, easy to create, and displays and interacts with a mathematical concept very directly.

6/08

It was a day for working with a lot of projects I already started. I finished up my tutorial on the typing game, including as many pictures as I could. I spent some time working with Michael Marion on his space project to help him work out some bugs there. I worked more on some of the small projects I had, and spent a long time going through textbooks looking for ideas of what to start working on next. Most existing tutorials so far involve having the student creating a project that they can use to learn once they play it. Many examples are creating learning games. I don't blame most of the tutorials for being that way, because that is by far the easiest type of tutorial to think of.
I am interested in creating tutorials that focus more on concepts being learned in the actual code. I feel that many tutorials waste time on having the student create a user interface within the game (once the world is played), which does little more than teach them skills of how to use Alice. I want to start creating tutorials for programs that are much more simple, but touch on core concepts in the actual code (as opposed to using simple code to create some sort of game to teach the concept). I have experimented with this some already by creating a world that moves objects to create a plot following a function created in the code. These types of programs are more educational, in my opinion, because it forces the student to think about how their code is working, as opposed to just exactly following a tutorial given to them. The learning comes from tweaking functions and pieces of code and THEN playing the world to see the outcome.
Unfortunately ideas for these types of worlds are the hardest to come by. It's easy to think of a finished product that's a learning game, but hard to think of a world that uses core concepts in its creation.

6/07

Today I got well into creating a tutorial for my typing game. I spent a good amount of time cleaning up my code, which luckily could be simplified and cleaned up a lot. I created my slideshow in Google, being careful to use as many screenshots and arrows as I could to display the points I was trying to make. It was a slow process, as I had to recreate the entire program, but I am nearly done now. I made a point to try to include the elements that I liked from earlier tutorials I went through. These include:

• Putting elements that you need to interact with in red.
• Describing the purpous of a section or activity before delving into it.
• Keeping the font big and the content-per-slide low.
• Giving a good list of additional challenges at the end of the tutorial to give learners and teachers ideas for going more in-depth

Tomorrow I will finish up and get Michael and Chris to read over the tutorial and see if they have any suggestions. Hopefully by then they'll have a few similar tutorials and we can all just swap.

6/06

Now that I'm done with the typing game (although not done with a tutorial) I have been looking through a lot of the NC Standard course of study in order to get some new ideas. Today I created a couple simple new worlds. The first was inspired by the CS standards, and is a way to practice simple 4-bit binary. The code uses penguins to represent bits. It could easily be expanded to help conversion between other bases besides 2 and 10, a possible project for the future.
I also created a small, very easy-to-make program using birds to model graph equations. This world uses a function to tell birds in different positions how high they should fly. In the end, the birds act like points on a graph. This idea could be delved into a good bit more, but I think the base idea is a good one.

6/05

Today I read a paper on another program used in high schools to help develop computational thinking, iMPaCT (Media Propelled Computational Thinking). This program has been successful at giving students with inadequate background in mathematics a better chance at succeeding in classes like Pre-Calc. Although they use TI-Basic as their language, many of the concepts mentioned in the design of their program will be good to keep in mind in creating Alice worlds as well. For example they stress the importance of "algebraic (symbolic), graphic (geometric), and computational (numeric) representations of mathematical concepts". In addition to this, they try to emphasize adaptive reasoning and strategic competence.
In Alice today, I created and finished my typing race game. I am hoping that I simplified the concepts enough from my last typing game so that elementary/middle schoolers will be able to follow and create the code themselves. The world currently only includes letters on the home row, but could easily be expanded to include any or all of the letters and numbers.

6/04

Today I talked with the group about my typing Alice world and got some good ideas. I've decided I'm going to try to create a racing game in which typing quicker helps you move faster. I plan on essentially remaking the world, because there were some serious problems in the one I currently have. Most importantly, I learned that you can change the text in a 3D text object, and you can randomly select from a list. I also started to work through some of the more advanced tutorials. I have to leave early today, so that's all, more next week.

6/01

Today I developed my blog site enough to move my posts over from blogger, so from now on all of my post will be put up here. I also completed my Alice world working with typing skills. This world makes use of arrays, and random choice from them. The "random choice from an array" idea could be a good one to make a small tutorial about arrays. This is done by generating a random number and then picking out that index from the array.
I read over Elizabeth Liang's CSURF thesis as well.

5/31

Today I worked a lot on the website that will be my blog as soon as I get it up and running. I also worked through more of the Alice tutorials, completing all of the ones featured in the workshop. I began work on an Alive world of my own that will help students work on typing skills.

5/30

This is my second day on the job, and so far I've been working through the Alice tutorials. I read one of the papers authored in part by Dr. Roger, "A Pre-College Professional Development Program", giving me a good overview of how Alice is currently used in schools.