Friday, January 30, 2009

First Year Seminar with Alice

I just finished teaching a January term first year seminar course (highlighted in this YouTube video). Nineteen students (all non computer science students) explored computer science and programming. We used the Alice programming environment which allowed us to construct some interesting 3D animations. In general, the students seemed to like the challenge of providing instructions for their 3D worlds. Although I enjoyed teaching with Alice, I am still convinced that Python is the appropriate programming language for beginning students. This is especially the case when used with our cTurtle (turtle graphics) and cImage (image processing) modules.

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