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

[Diana (Hatch) Faizoulline]

Only problem with Alice ... terribly buggy working over the network.  Often
students are unable to complete a save or later unable to open the file.
Very frustrating.


Diana (Hatch) Faizoulline
McKinnon Secondary College
McKinnon Road, McKinnon 3204
Telephone: (03) 8520 9085
Email: hat at mckinnonsc.vic.edu.au
http://www.mckinnonsc.vic.edu.au/home/hat/ 
 
 
 
 
 
 
> -----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, 6 March 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)
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