Teaching Alice in Hawai’i: Cultural perspectives

The Alice programming language and environment has been used successfully to teach entry level students the fundamental concepts behind object oriented programming. While there are numerous studies regarding the pedagogical effectiveness of the narrative approach offered by Alice, the incorporation of cultural perspective into the teaching of Alice presents numerous challenges and opportunities. In this paper, we discuss the challenges of implementing Hawai´ian mythology into the Alice approach, while demonstrating how the inclusion of these myths and legends into an introductory Alice course presents a natural vehicle for the narrative approach offered by this language. Finally, we discuss the instructional efficacy of this approach by exploring student survey data.