[mfragin]

I have attended two conferences for educators using Alice in their Computer Science curriculum (back in the mid 2000s, I think). The Alice Team at Carnegie Mellon were great in their efforts to make something for educators teaching CS at the high school entry level. In fact, one of the workshops was shortly after Randy Pausch passed away. I remember it being a pretty somber time on campus at CMU.

Don Slater and Wanda Dann (two of the original Alice team members) were extremely approachable and helped me build a darn good high school CS curriculum that offered many classes for kids in a pretty low socioeconomic school on Colorado's front range. Don even was an old-school tabletop sports gamer who played a lot of Paydirt (an Avalon Hill title) back in the day.

I was a bit of throwback and taught kids text editors, SVN (they just wanted to use "Dropbox" to collaborate), and Linux (my classroom was a Linux LAN and it was pretty fun to teach kids how to administer it with me)--I appreciated Alice as a great way to get kids working on day 1 on programming concepts.

Using recursive methods to make a shark attack a person swimming in the ocean was one of the lessons I used to teach. In fact, if you want to pretend you're a freshman in Intro to Computing, my lesson (for the level 4 challenge: the advanced level) is still in Vimeo:

https://vimeo.com/98328965

Be kind :-) I was stretched so thin. I basically created the entire HS CS curriculum (except for APCS), and I would create these screencasts just in time, adjusting them as necessary for my students that year.