Teaching Programming with Alice on an Activboard

If you want to teach computer science principles to kids – do try and check this out…

http://www.alice.org

From here you can download a free program from Carnegie Mellon Uni. that lets you create and control objects and characters in 3D worlds.

It is clearly very powerful for teaching the fundamental basics of computer programming (if you do not know about geeky, programmer type things like classes, events, properties, variables, parameters, functions and methods – you will after an hour or so with Alice). Being completely visual it helps make complete sense of the basics of programming – and is stunning on the Activboard – it really make kids want to jump up, interact with it and make it all work….

For example, in one scenario there are characters such as a Pharoah (such an object is called a Class) and in that class are all the bits that make him up – e.g. Head, Body Limbs, Crown, etc. With a combination of drag and drop and pull down menus, all operated easily on the Promethean Activboard we could program the Pharoah to do almost anything…

There are even special ‘methods’ such as ‘think’ or ‘talk’… so that it can be used to create an interactive storyboard like a movie.

Within minutes, seven year olds had mastered the basics and created their first adventure. The software even lets you save your work as a webpage so others can see it and see the code that was used. Here is the first attempt (for some reason the speech and thought bubbles are not working as we expected online – but they will in your class). You can also see the programming used on the web page

http://www.zen57329.zen.co.uk/Pyramid_Adventure/Pyramid_Adventure.html

You may need some extra plugins to download to view it, but the webpage has all the details and they are fairly straightforward.