Talk:Alice (software)

Old Info?

Has anyone even read this page in a few years? The development "schedule" here is at least two years old, talking about "possible 2008" things. I will try to get some updated information on that "schedule" and possibly edit the page. --Koeckritz (talk) 20:27, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

Alice 3 release

Anyone have information about an expected release date for Alice 3 or any information pertaining to it?

There is a prospective release date of Marchish 2008. Development is expected to span anywhere from 18 to 24 months.--Mr Nemo 19:35, 11 October 2006 (UTC)

The Alice Community is getting ready to expand the article. The above question will be answered as soon as I know myself.--Mr Nemo 19:26, 11 October 2006 (UTC)

Storytelling

WHOA. I can't believe this hasn't been removed yet!

Most programming languages are designed around computation, whereas Alice is designed around "storytelling" and thus has greater appeal to female students.

Yeah, of course, because girls are bad at math and prefer to spend their time telling stories. Where was this written? Afghanistan? Geez. Xezlec 01:49, 7 April 2007 (UTC)

Having looked at the citation, I see that the claim was made by the citation, not the Wikipedian. I'm modifying the article to be slightly more explicit about that. Xezlec 03:01, 9 April 2007 (UTC)

Wikipedia does not take a position on what motivates girls. Their website links to research articles on middle school female motivation. Without a counter cite, there is no reason that wikipedia should distance itself from the CMI position. If you want to dispute their claims you need counter cites (and most likely fairly specific ones). Moreover be careful of context here, the software is developed to address 3 core areas... That is you are essentially dispute why the software developers wanted to develop the software by shifting the evidence where you did. jbolden1517^Talk 03:11, 9 April 2007 (UTC)

I changed the wording to reflect the intentions of the designers, which meant removing the condescending language. 24.161.49.138 03:24, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

"Better grades" from dumbing down?

"In controlled studies at Ithaca College and Saint Joseph's University looking at students with no prior programming experience taking their first computer science course, the average grade went from a C to a B and the retention increased from 47% to 88%."

Because this "grade" was now based on using a click-and-drag storymaking game instead of an actual programming language? That'd hardly be surprising. But the text isn't specific. It seems deliberately vague, as though that were part of this software's promotional agenda. Does it really help to allow students to play with a dumbed-down toy like this in lieu of learning an actual language? That's what I'd like to know, and I think other readers of this article would like to know too. —Preceding unsigned comment added by SomeAvailableName (talk • contribs) 20:05, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

Be careful with the idea that it is 'dumbed down'; the skill of programming is in crafting appropriate algorithms for the tasks you wish to accomplish within the environment you're targeting, not in learning twenty or thirty keywords and how to type them in the correct syntax. So called 'real language' tutorials are frequently far more contrived than the Alice environment, too. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 90.195.192.80 (talk) 19:02, 22 September 2010 (UTC)

Criticism

This article should contain a criticism section. Though I myself don't have any sources, from personal experience I can say that most students dislike using Alice. The program can in some cases be very buggy and work in Alice requires more moving objects around to be correctly placed than actual programing topics. Alice is often used in a Computer Science I course, where the students are already interested in computer science and actually loose interest because they are waisting time doing mostly pointless exercises instead of learning a programing language. Also, the 'directing' aspect of Alice is of no interest to most students middle school aged and up and the goal of making computer programing more compelling totally fails.

See also...

www.visuallogic.org (executable flowcharting)

What is this doing in the See also section? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.111.173.147 (talk) 18:51, 4 December 2011 (UTC)

Article should be clearer about Alice 3 license

It says that Alice 3 is released under "an open-source license". While in the most literal sense that is true, I think most people would assume that means that the source code is publicly available, which it is not; I sincerely doubt that this would qualify under the Open Source Initiative's definition of an open source license, for example. This is very misleading. —{{u|Goldenshimmer}}|✝️|ze/zer|😹|T/C|☮️|John15:12|🍂 04:46, 2 March 2017 (UTC)