Transition: Alice 2 to Alice 3 in Community Colleges

Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh PA

Investigators

Abstract

This ATE Project project addresses three issues in computing technology education in community colleges: (1) the need to reduce first-year attrition rates in computer science and information technology programs, (2) the need to adapt innovative approaches for teaching introductory programming to community college students, and (3) the need to provide effective community college faculty development materials for training in using innovative approaches. In our previous ATE project, JABRWOC (#0302542), they studied the effects of teaching fundamental programming concepts with visualization in pre-CS1 courses in community colleges. In this project, the innovative approach tested in JABRWOC will be extended to include a transition from Alice to Java in CS1 courses in community colleges, using the new, more powerful version of the software. In addition, this project proposes to develop a peer mentoring model and workshop materials designed to support community college faculty as they learn to teach with this innovative approach. Through our evaluation efforts, we will study the effectiveness of this approach for retaining students in pre-CS1 and CS1 courses and the effectiveness of the peer mentoring model and workshop materials for community college instructors.