Sun Supports the Alice Project
Yesterday it was publicly announced that Sun Microsystems will be teaming up with Carnegie Mellon University to support the development and deployment of Alice v3. The partnership makes perfect sense for both Sun and CMU. For Sun, the Alice system is a fantastic vehicle for promoting innovative teaching of Java programming to students at all levels, ranging from middle-school kids to college students. For CMU, Sun’s support not only represents an endorsement of Alice as a key player in the Java technology space, it also represents the most important source of funding for the project provided to-date.
The Sun partnership is only the latest in a great string of education-related grants and gifts. A couple of months ago, a team consisting of Tom Cortina, Carol Frieze, and Wanda Dann received a $1.5M grant from NSF to conduct innovative summer programs for high school teachers, focusing especially on schools in disadvantaged parts of central Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and eastern Ohio. And last year, Dave Touretzky received similar funding (also from NSF) to build the ARTSI Alliance, which is developing innovative robotics-based introductory CS curriculum, in partnership with a large number of historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs).
Add to these large grants the numerous single-investigator/educator grants we’ve received this past year, my involvement in the newly formed CRA Committee on Education (CRA-E), and the appearance of new education-focused Ph.D. students like Leigh Ann Sudol, and it is clear that we have become a serious “go-to” place for new ideas in computing education.
Peter Lee @ November 20, 2008