Have blogged recently. I've been working on the game project a bit, eg working on the excel design document, reading and listen to podcasts. Starting to realise that i've maybe taken on to much.
What I did want to do is make some notes/reflection on using Alice with student trying to learn actionscript. This is experience has been interesting.I doing it with two groups of student one a CERT IV group of students that I have high hopes for and a Diploma group of students. The CERT IV students don't seem engaged but I think that is because they really see why the should be learning actionscript and they are feeling the pressure of time. The Diploma student have been more engaged and I think that is because of the timing, they have just started the client projects and this all going a bit slowly for them, so they have happy to be "lead" by the teacher for a while.
What I've tried to do is show a concept in Alice and then explore the application of that concept in Actionscript. This has been really hard because I've had to jump over bits of actionscript code saying "we will do that later". I think the student comment that put a finger on this was "Alice is just so easy compared to actionscript" I think next time I will just work in Alice for while and get the students starting to solve problems in Alice and then move them on actionscripting when they confident with the full range of concepts. The problems with this is the students might see Alice as irrelevant and just play and not something they need to learn about. Maybe Alice could be explored in just one day .
Some of thing I've done during the sessions I've been really happy with, but the sessions have been really "teacher lead" I would like try and develop an approach that was more about the students exploring the concepts. Some of the simple games etc where Ok. But some of the younger students didn't have lot patience for those.