Review: Using Alice as tool to teach kids how to code step by step

I had the luck of learning how to code when I was about 9 years old. I was getting bored with the game collection I had available on my MSX 2 home computer (guess my age now), and got my hands on a book full of code listings. The only thing I needed to do was input the listings into the MSX in Basic and run the program. This came down to lots and lots of debugging because of the many typo's I used to make. Once I came to understand the logic behind the programs I started making my own. In hindsight I can definitely conclude that understanding computer programming at an early age has served me well, I got to make a career out of it.

Nowadays it's probably even more important that you understand how computer programs works under the hood. I mean, the society relies on computer programs and they're everywhere: on your phone, freezer, car and so on. Some basic understanding of computer programming will help you to make sense of the world around you. So I'm quite happy that there are a lot of initiatives that help young kids take their first steps in learning how to code.

One cool initiative I want to mention here is Devoxx4Kids. It's an open sourced concept put forward by a foundation that provides hardware, assignments and instructions to aspirant trainers that want to use Devoxx4Kids materials to set up programming workshops. Checkout http://www.devoxx4kids.org/.

Another initiative is the one I want to delve into in this posting called 'Alice'. It's a programming environment based on Java technology that enables kids to code simple games and animations in 3D. It has been developed and open sourced by the Carnegie Mellon University and is already used globally at lots of primary schools.

What makes it attractive is that - without writing any code - a 3D scene can be set up. Alice has a large amount of characters, items and objects that appeal to kids like funny animals, monsters, cars and helicopters that look like they escaped from a comic book. Alice also makes it possible to describe desired behavior of these different kind of objects quite easily. You can command a character to move to another one, create if then else loops and for instance animate the character's limbs and move the camera in the scene and proces user input. Again - without writing any code. And if you want to run your scene or your program, just hit play. No further IDE knowledge required. Last but not least: the Alice environment has been translated into many languages. I checked out the Dutch one, it's not the best translation you could wish for, but it should make it more easy for young kids to understand how they can use the tool.

Now, if your kid does want to write code to have even more control over the scene, that's also no problem. One can open the Alice project files in Netbeans and edit the Java code directly thanks to the Alice plugin for Netbeans. Netbeans is a popular open source code editor for those unfamilar. So the nice thing is: if you can get your son or daughter interested in setting up 3D scenes, and get them curious enough to animate the objects next they then might also be interested to take it one step further from there and dive into the Java code with Netbeans.

This makes Alice a very interesting environment to help kids get in touch with programming step by step. If you want to know more, there are a lot of resources available.

On the Alice website there are a lot of free textbooks, assignments and examples available. Also, check out downloadable Alice projects at Curriki.org. I also recommend this video if you want to understand how Alice and Netbeans play together
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)[Youtube movie]