Computer Programming with Scratch and Alice at Los Perales Elementary

In this class, students learn to program computers using two excellent, free programs designed for kids: Scratch (http://scratch.mit.edu) and Alice  (http://alice.org).

Scratch

The Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, creators of Scratch, describes it as follows:

"Scratch is a new programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art -- and share your creations on the web. Scratch is designed to help young people (ages 8 and up) develop 21st century learning skills. As they create Scratch projects, young people learn important mathematical and computational ideas, while also gaining a deeper understanding of the process of design."
 

Programming a cat to meow and walk in a rectangle using Scratch

Alice

The Alice team at Carnegie Mellon University describes Alice as follows:

"Alice is an innovative 3D programming environment that makes it easy to create an animation for telling a story, playing an interactive game, or a video to share on the web. Alice is a freely available teaching tool designed to be a student's first exposure to object-oriented programming. It allows students to learn fundamental programming concepts in the context of creating animated movies and simple video games. In Alice, 3-D objects (e.g., people, animals, and vehicles) populate a virtual world and students create a program to animate the objects."

Dave Briccetti's student Sarah says:

"I think Alice is a great program because you can do so much with it, from an animated aquarium to a 10-minute movie! I would recommend this class to anyone who's ever wondered how video games are made and who would like to learn how to make their own. Once you learn the basic controls in this program, it's easy to advance to harder scripts."

Characters in a three-dimensional Alice world

About the Instructor

Dave Briccetti has taught individual and small group classes in Lamorinda since moving to Lafayette in 1987. He has taught kids in the Lafayette School District in several Super Saturday Seminars and in lunchtime and after-school computer clubs. He is now teaching an after-school class—this very class—at Rheem Elementary in Moraga. Since 1992, he has taught programming to grades 4–10 students at the Diablo Valley College College for Kids summer program in Pleasant Hill, California. Before that he taught for several summers at the Oakland Feather River summer computer camp in Quincy, California. But Dave really makes his living as a software developer.