2008 Classes

Learn to program computers using Scratch (http://scratch.mit.edu) and Alice  (http://alice.org).

Scratch makes it easy to create interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art, and share these creations on the web. Scratch is designed to enhance the technological fluency of young people, helping them learn to express themselves creatively with new technologies. As they create Scratch projects, young people learn important mathematical and computational ideas, and they gain a deeper understanding of the process of design.

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. 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.”

Learn to program using the popular Python language (www.python.org). Python is used for creating games, websites, and much more. Unlike Scratch and Alice which are primarily learning environments, Python is a real programming language used by professionals (Google, for example, has lots of Python programmers).