A Teaching Methodology for Introductory Programming Courses using Alice

Enrollment numbers and retention rates have been decreasing in technology programs in United States of America, particularly for underrepresented minority groups. At St. Mary’s University, we started an Engineering Summer Program (ESP) that consists of programming and robotics sessions for high school students. The programming courses offer an opportunity for many students to write a computer program for the first time in their lives. In these courses we are using a popular instructional tool for teaching programming called Alice. Alice is a 3D interactive environment that has visual and narrative aspects. Our objectives include motivating the students to start programming, keeping the frustration levels to a minimum, which is a common problem for new programmers, and increasing the students’ problem solving skills. In this paper, we present a survey of the common challenges faced in introductory programming courses, the objectives of these courses, and our approach to start programming using Alice with a transition to Java, a popular object-oriented language.