Bringing Boys And Girls To Computer Science With 'Alice'

With support from the National Science Foundation, she and collaborators nationwide are using the power of storytelling to draw younger students into programming. An animation program called "Alice," invented by the late Randy Pausch of Carnegie Mellon University, allows student programmers of all ages to create their own worlds without realizing they're actually writing code.

Rodger recalled the rush of introducing fourth-to-sixth graders to Alice during an annual event that brings elementary school girls to the Duke campus to meet with female professors.

"They learned Alice for half an hour, and then they got to create a world with it," Rodger said. "'Oh, wow, look!' they told each other. 'Come here. Show me. Look at this!' They were creating little stories with Alice, and in the process they were programming. They didn't know they were doing programming, but they were."

At Alice summer camps for middle-schoolers at Duke, "students were very engaged with Alice and were always asking for more time to work on their own worlds," Rodger reported at the March 2009 Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education in Chattanooga, Tenn. "After five or six hours of Alice each day, we still had difficulty getting them to stop, turn off their Alice worlds and logoff at the end of the day."

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