From intuition to measure: Styles of use in Alice: Identifying patterns of use by observing participants in workshops with Alice

After several rounds of workshops on Computer Animation with Alice, a free platform for three dimensional computer animation created by Carnegie Mellon University, a pattern of styles of use was observed. Some attendants seemed to try to follow the instructions given and attempt to reproduce exactly the animation the instructor was creating. A second group concentrated on creating visually attractive scenes; a third one on inventing stories and putting models in the scene to talk to each other according to those stories. In the fourth group participants wanted to go well beyond the instructor explanations and explored features and functions of Alice by their own creating complex and action-rich animations. At some point the consistency of those observations lead us to attempt a systematic study by crafting a description of the styles and designing observation tools to detect them and measure the frequency of each one. In this showpiece we will recount the experience, describe in detail the styles observed and present the results of the systematic observation in order to receive suggestions for improvement. We hope to reflect with viewers on why the study of styles of use in Alice could be important for visual languages and computer science education.