Wanda Dann

Wanda Dann, associate professor of computer science, joined Ithaca College in 1997 after completing her Ph.D. at Syracuse University. Her research focus, supported at times by grants from the National Science Foundation, has been on visualization and programming using Alice, a type of educational software designed to teach computer science in a three-dimensional environment. She has coauthored two books, Learning to Program with Alice (now in its second edition) with colleagues Stephen Cooper and Randy Pausch, and Exploring Wonderland: Introduction to Java Programming Using Alice and Media Computation with Stephen Cooper and Barbara Ericson. She has also published papers on the use of program visualization in teaching and learning introductory programming in the journal of the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE).

Dann has played a leading role in SIGCSE and is now a member of the SIGCSE board. After leaving Ithaca
College, she will continue her work with the Alice project at Carnegie Mellon as director but expects to maintain a relationship with IC’s computer science department after her retirement. “Working with students has been my favorite thing [about Ithaca College], and I will miss that,” Dann says.