The Oracle Academy and Curriki are working together to make the Oracle Academy’s “Getting Started with Java Using Alice” curriculum widely available to secondary school teachers and students. 
Java is one of the world’s most popular computing platforms. It is used by more than 9-million developers and powers more than 3-billion devices worldwide. The Oracle Academy provides education institutions a complete Java curriculum that can be incorporated into secondary school and college/university computer science programs.
Alice is a free platform from Carnegie Mellon University designed to teach students object-oriented programming by engaging them in something fun – making animated movies and games. By dragging and dropping graphic tiles that contain standard Java programming statements, students create programs to animate 3D objects that populate a virtual world.
They can run their programs immediately and see the relationship between the programming statements and the behavior of objects in their animations.
The Oracle Academy provides a complete portfolio of software, curriculum, hosted technology, faculty training, support, and certification resources to secondary and higher education institutions for teaching use. The Oracle Academy supports over 1,9-million students in 97 countries.
Curriki is a non-profit K-12 global community where teachers, students, and parents can create, share, and find free and open educational resources that enable personalised learning. Curriki has more than 335 000 subscribed members and reaches 8-million users across 193 countries.
It provides more than 46 000 primary, secondary, and teacher training resources across all subject areas, but with a particular focus on K-12 science, technology, engineering and math (STEM).
The Oracle Academy’s Java curriculum includes four courses (Getting Started with Java Using Alice, Creating Java Programs with Greenfoot, Java Fundamentals, and Java Programming) that are aligned to Oracle certification and the US Advanced Placement Computer Science A exam.
The Getting Started with Java Using Alice curriculum engages students with little or no programming experience to learn basic Java programming concepts.
“Oracle works to advance education with state-of-the-art technology programs that awaken and deepen students’ interest in computer science and engineering,” says Alison Derbenwick Miller, VP, Oracle Academy.
“Our Getting Started with Java Using Alice curriculum is designed to help students explore the power of computer programming. By collaborating with Curriki, we hope to deliver this introductory Java course to hundreds of thousands of teachers and students worldwide.”
“Computer science and heuristic thinking are the foundations of our information and technology-based society,” says Kim Jones, CEO, Curriki.
“We are thrilled that Oracle is helping to foster a new generation of software developers and problem solvers to face the pressing challenges of the twenty-first century by releasing this course on Java through Curriki. We look forward to ongoing collaboration with Oracle Academy in the future.”
“In classrooms around the world, Alice software has engaged students in computer programming, demonstrating that it can be creative and fun,” says Wanda Dann, director of the Alice Project at Carnegie Mellon University.
“We are excited that this learning experience will be expanded to far more students, thanks to the efforts of the Oracle Academy and Curriki.”