Tea Party

Welcome to Tea Party, the site dedicated to helping out adopters of two innovative approaches to teaching computer science: Alice and Media Computation. Teachers who taught Alice were concerned about how to transition from Alice to programming in Java. Students learn to program in Alice by dragging and dropping tiles to create 3D movies and/or games. Students in Media Computation learn to program by writing textual programs that manipulate media: pictures, sounds, movies, and text. Beginners often have a hard time in Java with learning both the programming concepts and syntax. With the combined approach beginners can learn computing concepts in Alice and then see how to implement them in Java using Media Computation.

By blending Alice with Media Computation we will take advantage of the interest and motivation students find in video games and animated films. We believe that this approach will appeal to a wide range of students while covering all the same skills and concepts mandated by curriculum standards. The primary goal is to provide a high impact, motivating context for introductory computing and programming courses at four-year and community colleges. Through our evaluation efforts, we will study the effectiveness of this approach for attracting and retaining majors and minors in CS.

For more information on Alice see http://www.alice.org. For more information on Media Computation see
http://coweb.cc.gatech.edu/mediaComp-teach.

The book Exploring Wonderland: Java Programming Using Alice and Media Computation by Wanda P. Dann, Stephen P. Cooper, and Barbara Ericson was published in August 2009 by Pearson/Prentice Hall. Error page for the book: Exploring Wonderland. Suggestions for the book: Exploring Wonderland. The cover looks like this:

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Last modified 12 November 2009 at 8:51 pm by Vida