Alice Curriculum Guides for K-12 Courses and Activities?

Greetings,

Really enjoyed the SIGCSE Alice workshops and tea party!

I'm starting to look at the curriculum materials for using Alice.

I was wondering if anyone had materials for short Alice activity sessions (1-2 hours) or Summer camps. Other K-12 focused material would be useful as well.

This weekend we will be using Alice for a Girls in Science event at my college. I think the plan is to show just enough to get the grils started and then cut them loose to play with Alice. We also plan to give them the Alice software on a CD.

Thanks and regards,

Actually, Amoreno's SCIFEST thread had many good ideas for K-12 activities.

For our Girls in Science activity we had groups of 6-8 grade girls for one hour. I decided to model the session after the one I attended at SIGCSE. We just demonstrated the minimum on how to create a world and turned the girls loose emphasizing the idea of telling a story. We did not try to cover much CS or even many of the control structures. (Although one girl actually wrote a new method during the session!)

We gave each girl a copy of the Alice software on a CD with an autorun menu that linked back to the main Allice site.

Alice pretty much sells itself as it is so engaging and that was clear in the sessions. We even had some parents that enjoyed playing with it.

My hope is that the girls will continue to explore Alice on their own. I'm trying to set up a feedback mechanism from the teachers that attended the session to get some anecdotal information and to develop follow-up activities. You can see that I am experimenting with a viral disemination model here!

Regards,

Tom Wulf