Project Profile

This is a proposal for a 3 year project to be conducted as a collaboration among 8 higher education institutions and several school systems across the country, with Saint Joseph's University in Philadelphia, PA serving as the lead institution (other collaborators are from Colorado School of Mines, Ithaca College, Santa Clara University, Duke University, the University of Mississippi, Columbia College, the University of Charleston and the Virginia Beach School System). The primary goal is to attract and retain students in computer science, especially women and underrepresented minorities (including two EPSCoR states). To this end, the project will use Alice (freely available from www.alice.org), a software program that utilizes 3-D visualization methods, as a medium to create a high-level of interest in computer graphics, animation, and storytelling among high school students, hence to build understanding of object-based programming. Such an IT focus on media and animation is aligned with national computer science standards. The project will build a network of college and high school faculty, who will offer workshops and provide continuing support during the academic year. In each site, pairs of teachers from each participating school (total = 90) will learn with university faculty via a 3-week summer program in which an introduction to using Alice for teaching will be followed by teacher development of materials for students that will then be used to teach high school students. An experimental start at one site will be followed by implementation at four additional sites and culminated with revised implementation at the sixth site (1-4-1 design). We ran a pilot workshop at Virginia Beach, and Virginia Beach teachers taught using Alice. We (the Virginia teachers) created a model for using Alice in the classroom that adheres to the Virginia State Standards of learning. Additional information is available at the web sites http://www.aliceprogramming.net