Quote:
Originally Posted by miguelito928
I was talking with a colleague about what we thought were two of the most under-taught skills necessary to be a successful programmer. We were wondering if Alice included these concepts.
The two vital skills we hope to see in Alice are Debugging and Utilization of API Documentation.
Are these already included somehow in Alice? If not, what are your thoughts about their effectiveness if they were included?
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There is no debugger of any significance in Alice 2.0, and since most error messages are presented in a Java context, they mean little or nothing to most intro programming students. However, I'm not sure I agree that the use of a debugger is particularly useful in an intro programming course
(but it certainly wouldn't hurt to have one). Because Alice 2.0 has no place in a programming curriculum beyond the intro programming course, I don't consider the lack of a debugger to be a serious weakness of Alice 2.0.
API documentation, or any other official documentation for that matter, is totally non-existant. In my opinion, this is the greatest failing of Alice 2.0. Let's hope that Alice 3.0 doesn't suffer from the same failing.
Dick Baldwin
Free Alice tutorials:
http://www.dickbaldwin.com/tocalice.htm
Free programming tutorials:
http://www.dickbaldwin.com/toc.htm