I viewed Randy's last lecture a while back and would highly recommend others to watch - it's very moving<br><br>Also, there is a great commentary on the lecture by mark guzdial at his amazon blog:<br><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/blog/post/PLNK1LG69K8X6WGH9">http://www.amazon.com/gp/blog/post/PLNK1LG69K8X6WGH9</a><br>
his comment about the third head fake<br><br>thanks Margaret for drawing attention to this<br><br>-- <br>Bill Kerr<br><a href="http://billkerr2.blogspot.com/">http://billkerr2.blogspot.com/</a><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">
On Thu, Mar 6, 2008 at 10:08 PM, Margaret Lawson <<a href="mailto:margaret.lawson@konstantkaos.net">margaret.lawson@konstantkaos.net</a>> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
Alice is "an innovative 3D programming environment that makes it easy to<br>
create an animation for telling a story, playing an interactive game, or<br>
a video to share on the web. Alice is a freely available teaching tool<br>
designed to be a student's first exposure to object-oriented<br>
programming. It allows students to learn fundamental programming<br>
concepts in the context of creating animated movies and simple video<br>
games. In Alice, 3-D objects (e.g., people, animals, and vehicles)<br>
populate a virtual world and students create a program to animate the<br>
objects."<br>
<br>
It is a FREE programming package with lots of FREE resources for<br>
teachers ...<br>
<br>
Randy Pausch is the creator (or one of the creators) of "Alice" software<br>
project, and ... he is dying from Pancreatic Cancer.<br>
He delivered his last public Lecture at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU)<br>
in Pittsburgh ( dubbed the "Last Lecture") called "Really Achieving Your<br>
Childhood Dreams". I managed to catch him on Oprah the other week (I<br>
know, I know) and thought It would be worthwhile to push the details<br>
onto the lists.<br>
<br>
If you teach programming, it is well worthwhile to become familiar with<br>
Alice. There are some great resources out there, suggested syllabus and<br>
online communities that use the environment as an introduction to<br>
programming. As for Randy, hunt up his "last lecture" (links from his<br>
site). It is worthwhile listening to and could even be good to show at<br>
school to some of the older kids.<br>
<br>
Links:<br>
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randy_Pausch" target="_blank">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randy_Pausch</a><br>
<a href="http://www.cs.cmu.edu/%7Epausch/" target="_blank">http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~pausch/</a><br>
<a href="http://www.alice.org/" target="_blank">http://www.alice.org/</a><br>
<br>
<br>
enjoy!<br>
<br>
Margaret<br>
(on leave from St. Michael's Grammar School)<br>
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