Learning to Program with Alice Beta Version - Couverture souple

Wanda Dann is the Director of the Alice Project and Associate Teaching Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. Her research has encompassed program visualization and object-oriented and event-driven programming. She has published papers on the use of program visualization in computer science education for SIGCSE, the Computer Science Education Journal, and related publications. She has been co-PI for three NSF-funded projects. She is an active member of the ITiCSE Visualization Working Group, studying the effectiveness of visualization in computer science education. She has taken on a major leadership role in the international computer science education community, serving as SIGCSE 2004 Program co-Chair and SIGCSE 2005 Symposium co-Chair.

Stephen Cooper is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and the Director for the Center for Visualization at Saint Joseph's University.¿He taught previously at Rivier College, serving as Computer Science program director. He has also worked at IBM as a systems programmer. Dr. Cooper's research interests lie in the semantics of programming languages as well as in program visualization. He is the author or co-author of a dozen articles, and has been the principal investigator for several National Science Foundation and private grants.

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Randy Pausch was a Professor of Computer Science, Human-Computer Interaction and Design at Carnegie Mellon, and co-founder of the Entertainment Technology Center. He also served as the Director of Carnegie Mellon's Alice research group, where he oversaw the development of Alice. He was a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator and a Lilly Foundation Teaching Fellow. In 1995, he spent a Sabbatical with the Walt Disney Imagineering Virtual Reality Studio and consulted with Imagineering on interactive theme park attractions, particularly for the "DisneyQuest" virtual-reality based theme park. Dr. Pausch authored or co-authored five books and over 60 reviewed journal and conference proceedings articles, and his primary interests were human-computer interaction, entertainment technology and undergraduate education.

Today's CS1 instructors must contend with an increased curriculum load, due to a switch from imperative languages to object-oriented languages such as C++ or Java — as well as students with little or no programming experience who are at high risk of dropping the CS major. Recognizing that fact, this text supports an innovative approach to teaching and learning fundamental programming concepts. The authors use program visualization to create an easy relationship between program construct and the animation action in a 3D world. Pedagogical goals include a fundamental introduction to programming with objects, methods, decision statements, loops, recursion, and problem solving.