Week 1 Wednesday

Summary:

Today I got the key from Jewel on the third floor and set up shop in the back right corner of D103. The room was initially empty but the Grad Student, Nihshanka came in mid morning so it’s quiet but not lonely. I began by exploring the site and ended up looking through the lesson plans and examples. I watched most of the worlds and read through about half of the lesson materials (needed to restart Alice after a few of the large worlds). After going through all the worlds on the example page, I started going through the slides of the tutorials. Spent some time setting this up and skimming through the journals from last summer. Tomorrow I will work on screen shots.

Thoughts:

From what I can see just looking at the tutorials and examples and lesson plans, there are two uses for Alice in the classroom. Either Alice is a supplemental tool that helps the teacher illustrate concepts graphically—the coordinate plane world is a good example—or alice is actually used by the students. This is something to keep in mind when developing lesson plans and helping teachers—is the goal to get them to a level where they can make their own worlds or develop material where we can teach them how to teach alice? I really liked the alice scavenger hunt document. I think the beauty of alice and kids is the way that it begs to be explored. When working with girls at the FEMMES camp, most of them don’t have the attention to sit through a tutorial and I think a better idea might be to let them wander and explore but with guides like a worksheet so they have something to work towards. I also really liked the way alice was used in the “FOG” animation. Sometimes with the lesson ideas I wonder if it can’t be done traditionally with the same effects (drawing a coordinate plane on the board for example) and why alice would be used. While alice certainly makes it more exciting for the kids, does that mean they learn better? I think that with the poem illustration it did add a different dynamic to the poem and the use of the cat in the animation made the question suddenly more relevant and memorable at the end. Hopefully this summer we can work on creating ideas and implementations that are useful not just because it is a cool and flashy way of presenting a concept but because it really conveys a topic or idea in a way that traditional methods can’t do as easily.

Hours: 8