Related Projects
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Alice is a
programming environment for creating 3D animated virtual worlds that was
designed to make programming accessible to novice programmers from middle
school through early college. Alice provides a drag and drop environment
which allows students to gain experience with a variety of programming
constructs without encountering the frustrations of syntax errors. By making
the process of learning less frustrating, Alice helps a broader spectrum of
students interested in learning to program get started.
Download Alice for free at
www.alice.org.
Kelleher, C., Cosgrove, D., Culyba, D.,
Forlines, C., Pratt, J., and Pausch, R.
Alice2: Programming without Syntax Errors. Demo at UIST 2002.
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Survey: Programming Languages and Environments for
Novice Programmers
In creating a new system designed to
attract a broader range of people to programming, it is important to
understand the approaches others have previously tried. I did an extensive
survey and taxonomy of programming languages and environments intended for
use by novice programmers.
Kelleher, C. and Pausch, R.
Lowering the Barriers to Programming: a survey of programming environments
and languages for novice programmers. Accepted for ACM Surveys, October 2004.
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Stencils Tutorial
Research suggests that girls may be drawn
to computers by an interest in what they can accomplish using computers
(Margolis, Fisher 2002). Like most programming systems, Alice originally had
a tutorial that focused on introducing features of the system without
providing a lot of examples of ways that users might want to use those
features. Through user testing, I found that while girls could successfully
complete the tutorial, they were often uninterested in continuing to use
Alice because they did not see how Alice could be used in pursuit of
projects that interested them. I created a new tutorial focusing on
projects that we believed would be of interest to girls. However, in
creating the new tutorial, I found that the tutorial worlds were necessarily
more complex, creating much greater potential for user errors. To alleviate
this problem, I created a new interaction technique called Stencils that guides
the user through the tutorial using instructions displayed over top of the
existing interface. The tutorial can draw users' attention to particular
components and prevents users from interacting with components not used in
the current step.
Kelleher, C., Forlines, C., and Pausch, R.
Stencil-Based Help and Tutorials. Carnegie Mellon Tech Report
CMU-CS-02-125. In a study comparing
the performance of middle school girls using a paper-based and
Stencils-based version of the same tutorial, I found that the users of the
Stencils-based tutorial completed the tutorial 26% faster, made fewer
mistakes, and required less human assistance to make progress. Users of the
Stencils-based and paper-based tutorials performed statistically similarly
on a quiz designed to assess mastery of the tutorial material.
Kelleher, C. and Pausch, R.
Stencil-Based Help and Tutorials. Submitted CHI 2005 |
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Through user testing, I found that middle
school girls often browse the 3D characters and objects available in the
Alice gallery to find story inspiration. Generation Faerie was an early
attempt to create Alice objects for middle school girls. As part of the
Generation Faerie project, a group of Entertainment Technology Masters
students and I developed a set of Alice characters and supporting scenery
inspired by a focus group and media marketed towards middle school aged
girls.
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Through user testing, I found that middle
school girls' success or failure at creating their own animated stories in
Alice is closely tied to the characters and objects they choose to add to
their Alice worlds. In the Alice StoryKits project, and Entertainment
Technology Master's student, Jessica Trybus, and I led a class of 13
Carnegie Mellon undergraduate students from a variety of majors in creating
StoryKits: collections of characters and objects designed to help middle
school girls get started telling stories in Alice. We invited a group of 10
middle school students (7 girls and 3 boys) from the local Pittsburgh area
to come to Carnegie Mellon each Friday and create stories using our
StoryKits. Based on our observations of the middle school students, we
developed 16 different StoryKits and a set of guidelines for the creation of
successful StoryKits.
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User Testing
My approach to designing a programming
system for middle school girls is strongly based on user testing. By working
with a wide variety of middle school girls, I hope to identify the most
important factors in giving girls a positive experience with programming.
Below is a list of some of the groups I have worked with over the last few
years. |
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Fall 2004, 54 students:
I am currently conducting a series of
workshops for local Cadette girl scout troops. In these workshops, I am
refining and evaluating the impact of changes made to Alice in support of
storytelling.
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July 2004, 20 students:
I taught a 3 day summer camp at the Houston
Museum of Natural Science. The students used a modified version of Alice
that includes support for multiple scenes and several animations designed to
make it easier to move characters relative to each other.
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Spring 2003, Spring 2004, Fall 2005, 70 students:
The Carnegie Museum offers classes for
homeschoolers in the Pittsburgh area. I offered several 2 session Alice
classes in which students complete the Alice tutorial and then build an
Alice world. |
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North Pittsburgh Homeschool Enrichment Program
Spring 2004, 19 students:
In this class, I compared the behavior of students using the Alice gallery vs. Alice StoryKits to create animated stories.
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People Always Learning Something (PALS)
Spring 2004, 16 students:
I compared
the behavior of students using the Alice gallery vs. Alice StoryKits to
create animated stories. |
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Summer 2003, 30 students:
As part of Georgia Tech's Technology,
Engineering, and Computing camp, I held a weeklong Alice class. Middle
school girls attending the camp completed the Alice tutorial and created
their own animated stories. Because the class was longer than a typical
Alice workshop, many of the girls were able to begin to create their own
methods, experiment with other programming constructs, and use more advanced
Alice features such as camera motion.
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Spring 2003,15 students:
I conducted an Alice workshop at a school
outside Toronto in cooperation with the IBM Women in Technology outreach
program. Students had 3 hours in which to complete the Alice tutorial and
create their own animated story using the Alice StoryKits.
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Spring 2003, 10 students:
The Neighborhood Academy is an independent
school serving Pittsburgh's inner-city youth. I ran an Alice class for 10th
grade students in which they learned basic programming constructs while
creating simple animations for 3D characters. |
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Summer 2002, 40 students:
The Carnegie Mellon Action Project (CMAP)
runs a summer program for minority high school students. As part of this
program, we offered a game programming class using Alice.
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