Week 1 Friday

Summary:

The CS site was down this morning so I continued exploring the teaching resources through alice.org. Once the site came back online, I read through the other side sites from the workshops run last summer like the schedule and sample worlds that the teachers and students did. I started going through all the tutorial slides with a critical eye as to which parts were confusing and how each set could be improved. Professor Rodger could not come in today (sick child) but I was able to talk to her on the phone. She told me about how Alice 3.0 fit into the plans for the summer—apparently there will hopefully be a demonstration/introduction to it at the workshops—and although there is a version out, it still has too many bugs and not enough features to be used in the classroom. Maybe next fall. I printed off the slides and papers suggested by Prof. Rodger and will begin looking through them, making notes of changes. Also updated yesterday’s post to mark out where the broken links are.

Thoughts:

I think most of the tutorials are ok. Some of them are confusing because of the concept being taught and the way instructions are worded. I think that the tutorials shouldn’t simply be a step by step tutorial but also teach some of the basic concepts of programming. I especially liked slides the slides giving definitions of terminology like inheritance. I think that alot of what hangs people up is the vocabulary. I think on some of the power points, there could be a stronger connection to the concept being taught and not just a step by step walk through. The goal is so the user will be able to master the idea well enough to do it on their own and some of the tutorials seem a little too specific. Hopefully we can redo them so that they are clearer and simpler but still effective. Will also try to brainstorm other topics that can be written on. I really like that the tutorials have a sort of hierarchy, so that there are “prerequisite” tutorials one must complete before doing another one. I think we can really take advantage of this to make sure there isn’t as much redundant information between them because we can assume they know how to do things and we don’t need to walk them through everything.

Hours: 8