Friday Photo Op: Rising 10th Graders from Birmingham and Bessemer City Schools Learn Computer Programming

Students will create movies using Alice 3-D graphical programming language, and they will present their work to family members during the final week of The Alice Film Festival of the Aladdin program for 10th Graders. The festival is a series of weeklong summer camps by the UAB Center for Community Outreach Development (CORD)

June 26, 2008

Students will create movies using Alice 3-D graphical programming language, and they will present their work to family members during the final week of The Alice Film Festival of the Aladdin program for 10th Graders. The festival is a series of weeklong summer camps by the UAB Center for Community Outreach Development (CORD)*. The camps are part of a $1 million National Science Foundation (NSF) grant for outreach by multiple UAB departments to Birmingham and Bessemer city schools students, who commit to a two-year after school and summer linear algebra/computer science program. This first component introduces students to the world of computer science as students use Alice (www.alice.org) to design and implement simple movies and video games.

The Alice storytelling approach in the films fosters analytic and logic skills development. The new effort consists of the initial summer program and continues through the students' junior year of high school. First, students attend an after-school course during their upcoming sophomore year exploring the mathematics behind Alice. Then, they participate in a program the following summer to learn computer programming using programmable robots; finally, they attend a junior-year program to learn advanced computer visualization skills using the UAB School of Engineering's computer visualization lab.

The final week of the program continues 8:30 a.m.-4:30 p.m. Thursday-Friday, June 26-27. The best time for photos is 9:30-10:30 a.m. Friday, when students will work on their projects with mentors. Also, 3 p.m. Friday students will demonstrate their weeklong project to family members. Twelve students and two local teachers are participating in this final week. The location is the computer lab, Room 145, Campbell Hall, 1300 University Blvd.

UAB Department of Computer and Information Sciences is collaborating with faculty in the departments of Mathematics and Mechanical Engineering and the School of Education at UAB to provide this training to about 60 students per year.

The program is a campus-wide effort involving principal investigators from multiple schools: Alan Shih, Ph.D., UAB School of Engineering; Jeff Gray, Ph.D., and John Mayer, Ph.D., UAB School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics; David Radford, Ph.D., UAB School of Education; and CORD Director and project leader J. Michael Wyss, Ph.D., UAB schools of Medicine and Social and Behavioral Sciences..

*UAB CORD is a university-wide center dedicated to advancing the outreach efforts of UAB students and faculty to empower area K-12 students to be highly competitive in math, science and technology.