Learning to Program with Alice - Softcover

For courses in C++ - Intro to Programming/CS1, Java - Intro to Programming/CS1, and Introduction to Computer Science. 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.

Wanda Dann is Associate 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 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. Randy Pausch is a Professor of Computer Science, Human-Computer Interaction, and Design at Carnegie Mellon, where he is the co-director of CMU's Entertainment Technology Center (ETC). He was a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator and a Lilly Foundation Teaching Fellow. He has done Sabbaticals at Walt Disney Imagineering (WDI) and Electronic Arts (EA), and has consulted with Disney on user interfaces for interactive theme park attractions and with Google on user interface design. Dr. Pausch is the author or co-author of five books and over 70 articles, is the director of the Alice software project, and has been in zero gravity.