Bring the Page to Life: Engaging Rural Students in Computer Science Using Alice

Fasy, Brittany Terese; Hancock, Stacey; Komlos, Barbara Z.; Kristiansen, Brendan; Micka, Samuel; Theobold, Allison

doi:10.1145/3341525.3387367

Cited by 10 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…Alice is a block-based storytelling approach that depends on the objects-first approach. Alice was introduced to female students in middle school as a computer program grounded on interactive 3D animated stories [51]. The program was introduced in 2005 by a group of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, led by Randy Pausch when American students' interest in Computer Science dropped by 50%-70% [48].…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Adoption of Visual Programming Environments in Programming Learning

Batiha¹,

Sahari²,

Aini³

et al. 2022

Int. J. Adv. Sci. Eng. Inf. Technol.

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Programming education is gradually integrated into the school and university curricula. Accordingly, studies in the Computer Science education field have highlighted issues such as high failure rate, memorizing, bugs, the complexity of concepts, motivation, and uconfidence faced by students when learning a programming language, specifically object-oriented programming. These issues require specific learning environments to reach the target audience. Therefore, the objectives of this article are to identify the issues based on previous work and to verify those issues by interview feedback conducted with lecturers in the Department of Computer Science and Information Technology at the Faculty of Information Science and Technology, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. Following that, the theoretical principles underpinning environments were studied to explore the suitability of these environments for university education based on the identified issues. The investigated environments included Turtle Graphics, Alice, BlueJ, Greenfoot, Snap!, and NetsBlox, a co-located collaborative block-based programming, and OOPP were studied and used to teach and learn object-oriented programming. Based on the interviews with experts, we found that students still had issues when learning programming, which involved memorizing, bugs, the complexity of concepts, unconfidence, communicating with students during a calamity (distance learning), and a number of students in labs. We conclude that these environments focus on some issues and ignore others, and no single environment satisfies all these issues, which causes students to be demotivated. In a further study, all these issues will be addressed by developing a learning environment, and its effectiveness shall be tested.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Adoption of Visual Programming Environments in Programming Learning

Batiha¹,

Sahari²,

Aini³

et al. 2022

Int. J. Adv. Sci. Eng. Inf. Technol.

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“…Alice is a block-based narrative environment designed to help at-risk female students increase their chances of success in computer science 1 and lower-level courses [14], [15]. An add-on for Alice, called AliCe-ViLlagE, was released in 2014 with the aim of improving students' confidence and collaboration by integrating the Alice environment with a pair of programming methods [16].…”

Section: Programming Language Issues and Challengesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Analysis of the learning object-oriented programming factors

Batiha

Majid

Sahari

et al. 2023

IJECE

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<span lang="EN-US">Students often feel overwhelmed by object-oriented programming courses. They find it difficult and complex to learn, requiring a high cognitive load to use the concepts in coding. These issues lead to demotivation in learning programming. This research aims to identify and verify factors that contribute to learning object-oriented programming from two perspectives: interviews and surveys. A literature review was conducted to identify these factors, followed by interviews with five experts who have been teaching object-oriented programming for over ten years to confirm them. Based on the interview results, a questionnaire was developed and administered to 31 bachelor students and 19 lecturers with master’s or doctorate degrees in computer science. The responses indicated that the identified factors were acceptable, with scores ranging from 3.74 to 4.65. The outcomes of this study are a set of factors that should be considered in a programming environment to improve the teaching and learning of object-oriented programming and make it more accessible and engaging for students.</span>

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“…The first project, based at Montana State University (MSU) and funded through NSF grant no. DRL 1657553, developed lesson plans that combine computer science content standards, IEFA Essential Understandings (EUs), and other (non-CS) Montana content standards by using storytelling [10][11][12]. This was achieved through the use of the drag-and-drop programming environment Alice, a programming environment that allows users to animate a virtual 3D world and made freely available by Carnegie Mellon University.…”

Section: Research and Development Teammentioning

confidence: 99%