Adventures in Alice Programming and Other Workshops
Duke University, Durham, NC
Interested in learning how to program with Alice 2 or Alice 3?
Adventures in Alice Programming is a project for integrating the programming language Alice into middle schools and high schools in the state of NC, based in the Durham, NC region. Originally, the target schools were the schools in Durham county, Vance county, Person county and Chatham county. We have now expanded to schools throughout NC. We have also taken a few teachers from other states.
Note that this is the page for the NC site. See information about other sites and more history with this project here.
We have created a Coursera course entitled Introduction to Programming and Animation with Alice that launched in January 2020. The course is 8 weeks on how to program in Alice. Each week is packed with a lot of material. It could take you 8-16 weeks to finish the course.
We are not running Alice workshops in summer 2020. Instead we created the online Coursera course on Alice 3 and ran a Beta version for teachers in Summer 2019 (started June 21, 2019). We also ran pilot courses (teacher has a private course with students). Duke and Coursera are investigating how to go forward with this. Click here for more information on that Beta course.
Free Alice materials for Use in K-12
Adventures In Alice Programming Duke Site by Computer Science
Professor Susan Rodger and the
Alice Team at Duke University is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
K-12 Alice materials we've developed:
Alice Teacher Lesson plans are here:
Alice Workshops
We ran Alice Workshops every summer through 2017. We ran three-week workshops (two-week workshop one summer and a one-week followup the following summer), with a new beginner workshop every summer. Those workshops were supported by an NSF ITEST Scale-up grant and IBM.
For more information about our Alice workshops, here is a 3 minute video of scenes from our 2012 workshop including interviews with teachers attending the workshop.
Thanks to Melissa Murphy for producing the video.Student Projects from Teachers who took our workshop
- Teacher Rebecca Roemer at Providence Day School shared these two student projects on YouTube
Other neat Alice web sites
Binocular depth perception in Alice - James Vanderhyde
News Articles about our project
Article about one of the high schools beta testing our Alice Coursera course.
Duke Today News Blog about the Alice workshop - July 18, 2014
Tech News World article with a quote from me about encouraging kids to learn programming (not specific to Alice) - Dec 10, 2013
Duke CS news article about workshop and pictures by Duke Photography on facebook - June 2012
Duke Chronicle article Alice Project to introduce children to computer science - June 22, 2011
Duke Today article Reviving Interest in Math and Science June 13, 2011
Duke Gist From The Mill article Reviving The Interest in Math and Science, p. 4, Spring 2011
Duke News made a video about our project on YouTube July 6, 2009.
An article appeared in Duke News on June 22, 2009. It got picked up lots of places such as Science Daily .
An article about this workshop and student camp appeared in Duke News on July 10, 2008. The article also appeared at wral.com and the Durham Herald News.
A blog about the project is on the www.instructify.com site under July 24, 2008 and titled "Adventures in Alice Programming Workshop at Duke University".
Past Workshops from Summer 2017
In summer 2017 we ran several workshops.
- We ran a Beginner Alice Workshop June 19-28, 2017.
- We ran our fourth Alice Symposium on June 20-21, which included a workshop on transitioning from Alice 2 to Alice 3.
- We ran a followup workshop for teachers who had previously done Alice to learn App Inventor programming and to followup on Alice programming and update teachers on our new Alice materials. This workshop was run on July 17-19, 2017.
Past Two-week Alice Beginner Workshop for Summer 2016
We held a two-week beginner workshop for teachers to learn Alice that had funding for lodging and a small stipend, thanks to funding from NSF and IBM. Priority was for middle school and high school teachers from NC, though we had room for a few teachers from outside NC. The workshop was held the two weeks June 20-25 and June 27-30, 2016. Teachers will be expected to return for a followup workshop in Summer 2017.
Past Alice Followup Workshop for Summer 2016
There was a two-day Alice followup workshop June 14-15, 2016 for teachers who attended our previous Alice workshops with preference towards those that attended the June 2015 workshop. This workshop was to present to other teachers how they are using Alice, to develop additional lesson plans and to hear about new Alice materials being developed.
Past Computational Thinking Through Mobile Apps Workshop 2016
NOT AN ALICE WORKSHOP, but we held an APP Inventor Workshop July 19-20 at Duke University. This workshop was funded by IBM.
Past Two-week Alice Beginner Workshop for Summer 2015
We held a two-week beginner workshop for teachers to learn Alice that had funding for lodging and a small stipend, thanks to funding from NSF and IBM. The workshop was held the two weeks June 16-20,22-26, 2016.
Past One-week Alice Followup Workshop for Summer 2015
There was a one-week Alice followup workshop July 13-16, 2015 for teachers who attended our previous Alice workshops.
Past Two-week Alice Beginner Workshop for Summer 2014
We held a two-week beginner workshop for teachers to learn Alice that had funding for lodging and a small stipend, thanks to funding from NSF and IBM. The workshop was held the two weeks July 7-11 and July 14-18, 2014
Past One-week Alice Followup Workshop for Summer 2014
There was a one-week Alice followup workshop June 16-19, 2014 for teachers who attended our previous Alice workshops.
PAST Alice Symposium 2013
It was a special week of Alice activities the week of June 17-21, 2013. We hold an Alice Symposium every 3-4 years in addition to our regular workshops. The Third Alice Symposium was held on June 19, 2013 with papers, posters and an Alice contest. There was two-day workshops related to Alice before the symposium on June 17-18 and after the symposium on June 20-21, 2013.
PAST Two-week Beginner Workshop for Summer 2013
We held a two-week beginner workshop for teachers to learn Alice July 8-12,15-19, 2013.
PAST One-week Followup Workshop in Summer 2013
There was a one-week followup workshop held June 17-21, 2013 for teachers who attended our previous Alice workshops.
PAST Two-week Beginner Workshop for Summer 2012
We held a two-week beginner workshop for teachers to learn Alice June 18-22,25-29, 2012.
PAST One-week Followup Workshop in Summer 2012
There was a one-week workshop held July 9-13, 2012 for teachers who attended our previous Alice workshops.
PAST Two-day Followup Workshop in Summer 2011
We held an Alice Followup Workshop on June 22-23, 2011 at Duke. The purpose of this workshop was for teachers who attended a previous workshop to get together to present to other teachers how they are using Alice and to hear about new Alice materials being developed.
PAST Two-week Beginner Workshop in Summer 2011
We held a two-week beginner workshop for teachers to learn Alice with funding for lodging and a small stipend, thanks to funding from NSF and IBM. The workshop was held the two weeks July 11-15 and July 18-22. Teachers who attended are expected to return for a one week followup workshop in July 2012.
Past Workshops for Summer 2010
We held several beginner workshops for teachers to learn Alice, and several followup workshops for teachers who had already used Alice to continue to explore Alice.
- Beginners: June 14-June 18, 2010
- Followup: June 21-22, 2010
- Followup: July 6-7, 2010
- Beginners: July 12-July 16, 2010
- Beginner (part of Project Lead the Way): July 29-July 30, 2010
Past Workshops and Symposiums before 2010
In the summer of 2009, we ran several events.
- 2-day followup workshop on June 15-16, 2009 for teachers who attended the 2008 workshop.
- Alice Symposium held June 17, 2009 attended by over 120 people.
- Three one-week introductory Alice workshops for
new teachers. (workshop
2009 page)
- One week Alice workshop June 22-June 26
- One week Alice workshop June 28-July 2
- One week Alice workshop July 6-10
In summer 2008 we held a three-week workshop for teachers to learn Alice and to develop materials. The first week was training in Alice. The second week involved developing Alice curriculum materials and lesson plans with aid from Duke faculty and students. The third week was additional development of materials and some testing of materials on students attending one of two one-week summer camps on Alice for middle school kids (workshop 2008 page)
Workshops/Symposia held before 2008:
- Alice Symposium - June 19-21, 2006
- Alice Workshop - June 11-12, 2005
About Alice
Alice is a 3D virtual worlds programming environment that makes it easy to create animations for either story telling or interactive games. We have used Alice with 4th-6th grade students on up to high school students.
Students can use Alice to integrate computer science with any other discipline. Alice can be used in two ways, at the lower level students can learn enough Alice to build interactive worlds to integrate it into course modules, or at a higher level as a complete course on learning programming. In any current module in which a student creates a poster or presentation, the student now can build an interactive story or game as the presentation.
See other related Duke Alice materials here .
Alice is available for free. For more information see www.alice.org .
Participating Regions
The "Adventures in Alice Programming" project has NSF funding for 2011-2016 to focus on three states: NC, SC, and MS. The NC site will take a few teachers from other states each year.
The "Adventures in Alice Programming" project ran in six regions of the country, 2006-2009 funded by the National Science Foundation.
- Durham, North Carolina
- Virginia Beach, Virginia
- San Jose, California
- Denver, Colorado
- Charleston, South Carolina
- Oxford, Mississippi
The Duke site has run continuously since 2008 from NSF funding and several IBM Faculty awards.
Contact
Susan H. RodgerProfessor of the Practice
Department of Computer Science
LSRC Room D237, Box 90129
Duke University, Durham, NC 27708-0129
Phone: (919)-660-6595
Email: rodger@cs.duke.edu
Supporters
| This project is funded by the National Science Foundation, grants ESI-0624642 and DRL-1031351. Any opinions, finding and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. | |
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Additional funds have been provided by IBM to boost the number of teachers participating in the Durham region and to continue workshops in other years. |
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