Alice Related News
Teaching Materials
Alice first appeared in 2000. Similar to Scratch in the way that it doesn’t require students to type syntax, instead using a drag and drop style of coding.
Alice is better than Scratch for introducing object orientated programming to students, but the software has a habit of crashing and importing your own models is overly difficult. There is also not the community support available that Scratch has.
However, if you can over come these couple of negatives, Alice is still a very good language for teaching programming. It also has the added benefit of being slightly aimed at getting girls interested.
Alice 3.1 was released in August 2012. Currently there are no materials to support this version other than the Alice forums.
There are currently three versions of Alice available:
Alice 3.1 – Aimed at KS4 and A-Level students.
Alice 2.3 – Aimed at KS2 and KS3 students
Storytelling Alice – A scaled down version of Alice aimed at younger students.
Useful Links:
Alice Programming Homepage
aliceprogramming.net
There are a number of curriculum related materials here, but you cannot access them without contacting your local Prentice Hall representative and as I have no idea who or what they are, it leaves the resources out of reach for the time being. If anyone can help me access them, please leave a comment below.
CAS – Programming at KS3
A Computing at School sample teaching unit for programming at KS3. One of the units in the document covers Alice.
Adventures in Alice: Tutorials for Grades 5-12
There are a number of good tutorials on this site with ready made handouts and presentations.
Learn to Program Using Alice
The format is very much like a publication rather than a website, but it does contain a lot of content at first glance.
Official Alice Forums
Alice resources are a little thin on the ground, so the forums become a vital place for developers to ask questions. There is a search facility available to see if your question has already been answered, but the forum itself is looking a little quiet these days. On last viewing there were only 6 posts within the last month.
An Introduction to Alice Programming
This book is a very good resource for slowly introducing programming concepts and the students found the projects fun and interesting. Certainly recommended if you are just starting out with Alice.
Learning to Program with Alice
It really is between this and An Introduction to Alice Programming book for best publication. I only had an older version of this so ended up using An Introduction to Alice Programming, but I have heard from other teachers that this is a very good resource and the reviews on Amazon are very positive too.
Not yet reviewed
Alice: The Programming Language
Only 1 review on Amazon so far, but it is a positive one.
Not yet reviewed
Alice 2.0 – Introductory Concepts and Techniques
There are two very positive reviews for this publication on Amazon.
