"AliCe-ViLlagE" Alice as a Collaborative Virtual Learning Environment

There is a growing literature demonstrating the importance of collaboration and teamwork in the process of learning computational thinking and the foundational aspects of computer science. While Collaborative Virtual Environments are becoming widespread in the software development professional domain and in various areas of advanced learning, their use in the introductory stages of learning computing is still very limited. On the other hand, in recent years, there has been a blooming of attractive programming environments specifically designed to expose young students (e.g., middle school age) to computational thinking. Alice is a very popular introductory programming environment, focused on programming through animations and story-telling. This paper introduces a novel extension of the Alice framework that enables interaction and collaboration among students in the development of programs. In particular, the new version of Alice described in this paper provides support for virtual pair programming. The modified version of Alice allows two students to remotely share a virtual world, and interact in its construction; the system supports roles assignments, to allow teachers to control activities and contributions of the two students in the creation of a programming project.