| Date | Speaker | Talk |
| Nov 4, 2004 | Joel Adams, visiting faculty, Carnegie Mellon |
"The Imaginary Worlds Camps: Using Story-Telling in Alice to Introduce Middle-Schoolers to Programming" |
The Imaginary Worlds Camps are two 2-week summer "computing camps" held at Calvin College the past two summers. These camps are a first step in attacking the problem of under-representation of women in CS by providing middle school boys and girls with a positive, separate-but-equal experience in computer programming. Each student arrives at the camp with a story they wish to turn into a computer-generated movie using Carnegie Mellon's Alice software. To create their movie, each student animates the characters in their story with the behaviors necessary to tell their story, and so learns the ideas and concepts of object-based computer programming. This talk will present the camp's syllabus, examples of student work, and assessment results.