Back in college, I volunteered to help on “Women in Computing Day” to teach middle schoolers programming using Alice. I also helped teach an undergraduate teaching assistant position for Engineering Fundamentals, the class all engineering students were required to take. The course used Alice to introduce the students to programming concepts (loops, methods, conditional logic, etc).
I thought Alice was a really innovative way of teaching programming. It was GUI-driven programming that was expressive enough to do cool engineering stimulations, but with the simplicity that middle schoolers could understand and use it.
The other day, my mom asked me to find the “Last Lecture” by Randy Pausch, some professor that made this speech. She had heard about on the T.V. and was interested in seeing what it was all about. I found the YouTube video and began watching it. To my surprise, Dr. Pausch’s work has crossed my path. He is the creator of Alice.
His speech is very inspiring. Watch it.
In another random six-degree-of-kevin-bacon incident, Randy Pausch’s mother was my high-school english teacher my senior year. I had her the last year before she retired and moved to China to teach English as a Second Language.
Ms. Pausch friggin hated me. She’s the reason I almost didn’t graduate. 🙂 (Yeah, I almost flunked outta high school….go ahead…)
Small world 🙂
Haha…good thing you didn’t flunk out. You might have been hearing “sudo make me a sandwich” as a job otherwise. 😛
How inspiring Randy Pausch is! If you liked “The Last Lecture”, another fantastic memoir I just read and highly recommend is “My Stroke of Insight” by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor. Her TEDTalk video (ted.com) has been seen as many times as The Last Lecture I think, and Oprah did 4 shows on her book, so there are a lot of similarities. In My Stroke of Insight, there’s a happy ending though. It’s an incredible story! I hear they’re making it into a movie.