Publications [#237172] of Susan H. Rodger

Conference articles OFFICIALLY ACCEPTED

1. Rodger, SH; Hayes, J; Lezin, G; Qin, H; Nelson, D; Tucker, R, Engaging middle school teachers and students with Alice in a diverse set of subjects, SIGCSE 09 Proceedings of the 40th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, vol. 41 no. 1 (January, 2009), pp. 271-275, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), ISSN 1096-3936 [doi]
   (last updated on 2026/01/19)

   Abstract:
   This paper describes the integration of the Alice 3D virtual worlds environment into a diverse set of subjects in middle school, including the development of tutorials, example worlds and lesson plans. In the summer of 2008 our experiences with middle school teachers included three-weeks of training in Alice and guidance in the development of lesson plans. Our experiences with middle school students involved two one-week summer camps of instruction in Alice. We found both the teachers and the students strongly engaged with Alice. The teachers created lesson plans with Alice worlds to interactively teach a topic and other lesson plans in which students build an Alice world on a particular topic either from scratch or using a template world. The students in the Alice camps had both instruction in Alice and free time to develop Alice worlds of their choice. We found that the students used a large variety of basic Alice concepts and computer science concepts in the worlds they built in their free time. © 2009 ACM.