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

[Dr Paul Chandler]

Alice is part of our year 9 "core" course, and Yarra Valley Grammar.  I
rather like it :-)

Anyone else using it? 

-----Original Message-----
From: yr7-10it-bounces at edulists.com.au
[mailto:yr7-10it-bounces at edulists.com.au] On Behalf Of Margaret Lawson
Sent: Thursday, March 06, 2008 10:08 PM
To: Year 7 - 10 Information Technology Teachers' Mailing List
Subject: [Yr7-10it] Alice Programming (and Randy)

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)
_______________________________________________
http://www.edulists.com.au - FAQ, resources, subscribe, unsubscribe Year
7 - 10 IT Mailing List kindly supported by http://www.vcaa.vic.edu.au -
Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority and
http://www.vitta.org.au  - VITTA Victorian Information Technology
Teachers Association Inc

DISCLAIMER:
This email and any files transmitted with it are confidential and intended solely for the use of the individual to whom they are addressed.

If you have received this email in error, please notify the sender immediately by return email and then delete this message. 

Any views expressed in this email are those of the individual sender and may not necessarily reflect the views of Yarra Valley Grammar.