The Alice Challenge is an opportunity for students to showcase their skills at creating 3D animations, engaging games, or immersive experiences using the Alice programming environment. The Alice platform encourages students to explore their creativity, all while making something meaningful. This ability for students to create a wide variety of creative artifacts makes it a great platform for hosting a judged competition. Hosting an Alice challenge can provide added motivation to get your community engaged in using Alice and as a platform to promote and celebrate the exciting work your students are creating.
We held our inaugural challenge in the Pittsburgh area during the 2017-18 school year. We were very excited by the response and engagement. We hope that by sharing what we did and providing a roadmap to hosting your own Alice challenge we can help you replicate this exciting event in your classroom, school. city or region. Read more about the first challenge here and take a look at all of the amazing work created! This could be your students!
Running an Alice challenge can help you:
Provide a motivating factor for students to engage in a computer science project
Market the excitement of computer science through outreach and partnerships
Provide opportunities for teacher professional development
Create a community of educators and students engaged in computer science education
Provide a community event to draw in partners and diverse students
Create avenues for direct volunteer and engagement between local groups and students
Provide an opportunity to showcase and celebrate student achievement
A short promotional presentation can be found here explaining the benefits of running an Alice challenge that can also be used to pitch the idea and build excitement for running an Alice challenge.
How Do I Run an Alice Challenge?
We have created and shared numerous documents and templates that can be used to help plan and manage your competition. Whether you want to host a large or small challenge you can make use of these materials to craft a challenge that suits you. What do we provide:
- Planning Documents: We provide a master planning document, teacher workshop outlines, a bootcamp planning document, and award ceremony planning document.
- Marketing Materials: We provide logo and brand assets, language library, social media language, web-site content, outreach messaging, presentation templates and content, template posters, flyers and signage.
- Challenge Management Materials: We provide suggested categories with judging criteria and guides.
- Alice Swag: We can definitely provide support in ordering Alice stickers, buttons, and T-shirts for prizes and promotion. Depending on our stock we will be happy to try to provide some Alice materials as prizes for your competition.
We have created a very detailed set of documents that you can review. Be sure to follow the embedded links to the additional materials. This document outlines a regional competition and may seem overwhelming but don’t worry you don’t have to do everything outlined for it to be a great experience for all.