| Abstract: | Declining enrollments in Computer Science (CS) courses have motivated substantial effort to develop innovative approaches that make undergraduate programs more attractive to potential majors, and that help students achieve success at higher rates. One of the more exciting developments recently has been the introduction of the Alice programming environment for building 3D virtual worlds. The drag-and-drop interface of Alice prevents programmers from creating syntax errors, which allows students to focus on programming concepts rather than the tedium of debugging code. While a number of articles that describe the use of Alice exist, what appears to be missing from the literature are detailed opinions of students who are taught both Alice and another high level language, such as Java or C++, in the same introductory programming course (CS1). The question of interest in this paper is whether or not students feel that Alice helps them to learn programming in another high level programming language? Student responses on an Alice survey are presented from 41 students who took a CS1 course consisting of approximately seven weeks of Alice followed by eight weeks of Java. Twenty-four students responded on the survey that the prior experience with Alice helped them to learn Java later in the term. Thirty students recommended continued use of Alice in the course, although, many suggested reducing the amount of time spent on Alice. A statistical analysis was performed to determine if there was a correlation between gender, year in college, or prior programming experience, to the responses on the survey. No significant correlations were revealed by this analysis. Results from the survey encouraged our department to continue using Alice in CS1 through the Fall 2007 term. However, due largely to the opinions of the students, we have reduced the amount of time spent on Alice to four weeks. |
