WhateverBlog

For the last two years my son has begged me to teach him how to write programs. I was hesitant to get too deeply into the subject while he was so young. I did set him loose with both Lego WeDo and Scratch, but didn't spend much time working formally with them.

Finally this week I got him started with Alice, a  free 3D programming environment developed at Carnegie Mellon University.  It includes tutorials that are simple enough for him to follow along, and it's a great way to expose him to Object Oriented Programming.

It's great to see his enthusiasm for a programming experience that is easy to use but still applicable if he pursues programming in other OOP languages -- Java in particular.

There is an Alice Teachers mailing list with archives for teaching ideas, and plenty of textbooks if you really want to delve deep, but we found the built-in tutorial was at just the right level for him.

However, once he knew how to control the worlds and characters, he had a hard time formulating a plan for movies and games for himself. So, I've come up with a series of challenges that he can use to see if he can (for example) have the ogre use his club to smash a beach chair, or make a character hop around like a bunny when he's clicked... and then make it look like the wizard did it by waving his wand.

Once he's through those, I'll teach him about storyboarding, and hopefully use the results of the challenges to storyboard an interactive movie so he just has to transition and add a few intermediary motions and scenes to get a pretty satisfying result.




Although the Alice website recommends Alice 2.2 for High School and College, based on our experiences so far, I'd also highly recommend Alice as a teaching tool for lower and middle elementary age kids who are eager to get a handle on computer programming.