Thursday, October 25, 2007

Alice, Storytelling, Motivation

Mark Guzdial:

And yet, teachers love Alice, and seem more likely to adopt it for their classes than our Python Media Computation.  Why?  That's part of Lijun Ni's research, which I've mentioned previously in this blog -- and there's more to talk about there, as well.  Let me suggest here one big part of it.  Alice is about storytelling, and we teach Python for media computation.  Storytelling is an even bigger motivator, an even more fundamental driver of human behavior, than manipulating media.  I continue to believe that the most significant bit in helping people learn programming is the motivation.  What are you doing with programming?  The language can get in the way, but people will go through a huge amount of effort to do something that they want to do.

No comments: