CTEC 120 @ CCC Spring 2010

This week is the start of Spring term 2010 at Clark Community College in Vancouver, WA, USA. My CTEC 120, Beginning Programming class starts tomorrow and the computers are loaded with Alice 2.2 and Alice 3.0 (whatever the latest version is).

When I asked for 3.0 to be installed a semester ago, I thought it would have matured a bit more. I'm perusing it at the moment and am not sure if I should even introduce it to the class.

My plan was to start with 2.2 then introduce 3.0 after mid terms. At the moment, I'm wondering how to do the transition.

Have any of you tried a 2.2 to 3.0 switch mid-term? Have any of you even tried to use 3.0 for a full term?

I haven't heard of Alice 3.0 being used in a classroom yet. Personally, I wouldn't switch to Alice 3.0 because of how different it is and there would require a transfer period to go over what was learned in 2.2 into 3.0, which could be used learning new content from 2.2.

Although, it could be done depending on the time you have and how much content you can cover to make up for the transfer period.

I'm hoping to do the same thing for next school year (as my tech dept. has refused to install new programs mid-year). My CS courses already use Java/Netbeans, so the path of Alice 2.2 -> Netbeans -> Alice 3.0 -> Alice/Netbeans would work wonderfully, but the lack of support for 3.0 is distressing.

I'd like to also eventually start out with Alice 3.0, because it handles classes/inheritance/data hiding much much better than Alice 2.2.

edit: I'd love to hear how it goes for you.