

Bringing Boys And Girls To Computer Science With 'Alice' - emontero1
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090623112115.htm

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pbhj
Article: "Rodger, who is trying to turn that around by making programming fun
to learn." [...] Prof Rodger: "It's a nationwide problem that there aren't
many women in computer science in general. For example, we only have three
women faculty in our department, out of 24 positions. And it's been the same
for the 15 years I've been here."

And? 3 women in the faculty, what's the relevance? I don't understand what the
sex of the programmer has to do with anything. What is the nationwide problem
that having more female programmers will correct?

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patio11
I think the strategy is hope that girls are accomplished enough logical
thinkers to be successful programmers, who can nonetheless be bamboozled into
believing that a career in computer science will involve a lot of telling
fantastic stories about golfing dragons without ever having to write code.

You are never going to address a gap in the number of female programmers by
playing around with dragon-and-drop programming. Industry does not need
dragon-and-drop. They need people who will take an intensely boring
specification document about business rules for an insurance company, and
translate that specification document into functional Java code and XML files.
Your XML editor will not have a dragon-and-drop interface.

A large part of me thinks that people who are not programmers are not
programmers precisely because they have some notion of what programmers
_actually do_ for a living and _would hate it_.

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jerf
As much as I loved the phrase "dragon-and-drop interface", I believe it works
better as "dragon-drop interface".

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stevejohnson
I really wish people would stop naming their software 'Alice.' This is at
least the third one I've seen.

On the other hand, it sounds effective at getting people interested in
programming.

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gjm11
This one's been around for years. Does it actually postdate your other two
examples?

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antiform
Does anybody here know somebody that has used this program to aid their
learning of computer science concepts? It's certainly an admirable cause, but
is this a better introduction to programming than something like Logo, which
has been used to teach programming to kids for many years?

Alice is impressive, and you can see the obvious programming influence, but it
seems like "Moviemaker with control flow and objects" more than anything else.
What problem is it trying to solve?

For me, the hardest part of learning elementary computer science was not
things like OOP or if-statements, it was data structures, algorithms, and the
difficulty of keeping many different interactions in your headspace. It seems
like in many CS programs, the data structures or algorithms class is the
"weeder" that separates the CS majors from the wannabe CS majors. Personally,
I believe the drop-off at this level is more important to address than how
many students enroll in CS 101.

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jerf
Step one is to "break the ice" and get them interested in computers.

Step _two_ is to figure out if they're any good at that.

A good childhood should be spent breaking the ice on numerous possible
interests and finding out what works with you and what doesn't. Everybody gets
abundant opportunity today to figure out whether they like sports, of all
kinds; we could do with more (good!) opportunities to figure out if you like
programming, or many of the other interests and hobbies that few children ever
get exposed to. Most won't be any good at programming. That's OK, because
everybody should be trying lots of things, and you won't be terribly good at
most of them. (Where "good" here includes some concept of enjoying it enough
to want to do it on your own, along with raw talent.)

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dfield
I used Alice to start off a beginning programming class at the high school
level. It worked great - they got really into it and loved to make things. I
think it helped my students' programming intuition as well as retain some of
the girls who were very hesitant about taking the class.

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daeken
I'm glad to see more attention come to this project. As noted in article, this
was originally started by Randy Pausch, known in large part for his "The Last
Lecture" lecture and book. He did some amazing things, and this project is
carrying on his legacy.

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yesimahuman
What really got me into programming was making web pages. In school they never
really go past "Here is how to make a link and make text bold". I think a lot
of kids could see the artistic and creative side to making an interactive
website that all their friends check out. I could see kids competing to see
who can add the coolest feature or make it look the best. But alas, my public
school never got far enough into anything for people to make anything fun.

