DESCRIPTION: The Introduction to Programming using Alice course is a one-semester elective for any student in grades 10-12. This course is designed for students who have had no previous programming experience. The Alice development environment uses 3D graphics to introduce students to computer programming. Topics to be covered include program design and problem solving, objects and classes, fields, methods and parameters, basic data types and defined operators, control structures (selection and loops), and lists.
Programming using Alice and Java continues to develop programming knowledge and skills by transitioning from the Alice development environment to a text-based Java development environment. Topics will include classes and objects, inheritance, scoping of variables and parameters, and a more realistic Java language display mode. Students will write both Alice and Java programs throughout the course.
WHAT IS ALICE?
Alice is an innovative 3D programming environment that makes it easy to create an animation for telling a story, playing an interactive game, or a video to share on the web. Alice is a freely available teaching tool designed to be a student's first exposure to object-oriented programming. It allows students to learn fundamental programming concepts in the context of creating animated movies and simple video games. In Alice, 3-D objects (e.g., people, animals, and vehicles) populate a virtual world and students create a program to animate the objects.
HOW DOES IT WORK?
In Alice's interactive interface, students drag and drop graphic tiles to create a program, where the instructions correspond to standard statements in a production oriented programming language, such as Java, C++, and C#. Alice allows students to immediately see how their animation programs run, enabling them to easily understand the relationship between the programming statements and the behavior of objects in their animation. By manipulating the objects in their virtual world, students gain experience with all the programming constructs typically taught in an introductory programming course.
Source: alice.org