Summer Assignment
 

Folks,

I'd like to use Alice for a summer assignment for my students taking Advance Placement CS next September. I will have them install Alice and work through the tutorials, but can anyone recommend something beyond the tutorials? I've met most of the students and they seem pretty sharp but they'll be working this assignment on their own with possible email assistance from me.

Ken

Have them make a small game/animation.

a small game or animation would be a good idea, but make sure to add some requirements to it, like having to use all the types of variables, and atleast some of the world functions like (random number, or math functions).

Or even have them make alice tutorials using the print statements (I made a few tutorials like that so you could look at them for examples) or along the lines of tutorials, have them make a video of teaching something on alice.

There are a number of good small textbooks you could request they buy, that's how I learned.

Indeed, you could try giving them an assignment that involved complex ideas, ideas that no one thought Alice could do (on its own;without scripts or modifications) when first seeing it. I don't mean things that often come up such as FPSes, but perhaps Street Fighter or [URL="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtJDT1A_e64"]complex code based spells[/URL] such as in Warcraft III. Trigger/JASS based spells in Warcraft III were probably the most spectacular player-made things you'd ever seen, and believe it or not they are completely possible in Alice, give or take a few nonexistent models.

I think making them do a small game with a list of requirements should suffice. I would recommend having them use certain events, creating a method and function with parameters, using various variables, creating a method that checks for a collision, creating static and dynamic arrays/lists, and using certain structures like "while", "do together", and "for all together."