[Yr7-10it] Alice Programming (and Randy)

[Margaret Lawson]

Alice is "an innovative 3D programming environment that makes it easy to 
create an animation for telling a story, playing an interactive game, or 
a video to share on the web. Alice is a freely available teaching tool 
designed to be a student's first exposure to object-oriented 
programming. It allows students to learn fundamental programming 
concepts in the context of creating animated movies and simple video 
games. In Alice, 3-D objects (e.g., people, animals, and vehicles) 
populate a virtual world and students create a program to animate the 
objects."

It is a FREE programming package with lots of FREE resources for 
teachers ...

Randy Pausch is the creator (or one of the creators) of "Alice" software 
project, and ... he is dying from Pancreatic Cancer.
He delivered his last public Lecture at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) 
in Pittsburgh ( dubbed the "Last Lecture") called "Really Achieving Your 
Childhood Dreams". I managed to catch him on Oprah the other week (I 
know, I know) and thought It would be worthwhile to push the details 
onto the lists.

If you teach programming, it is well worthwhile to become familiar with 
Alice. There are some great resources out there, suggested syllabus and 
online communities that use the environment as an introduction to 
programming. As for Randy, hunt up his "last lecture" (links from his 
site). It is worthwhile listening to and could even be good to show at 
school to some of the older kids.

Links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randy_Pausch
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~pausch/
http://www.alice.org/


enjoy!

Margaret
(on leave from St. Michael's Grammar School)