Learning to Program with Alice (not Mozart/Oz ML)

Learning to Program with Alice

The goal of our innovative approach is to allow traditional programming concepts to be more easily taught and more readily understood.

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We are trying it

Our first year CS course at McMaster University will be taught using that starting in about a week's time. So in about 3 months I'll be back to report on it.

We were hoping to find a highly interactive, visual environment to teach problem solving to the students, where they would learn how to program as a side-effect. Alice satisfies all these requirements except for the fact that it uses too many Java concepts instead of being more paradigm (and syntax!) neutral. But it was deemed to be close enough to our requirements to give it a try.

syntax neutral

syntax neutral