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

[Bill Kerr]

I viewed Randy's last lecture a while back and would highly recommend others
to watch - it's very moving

Also, there is a great commentary on the lecture by mark guzdial at his
amazon blog:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/blog/post/PLNK1LG69K8X6WGH9
his comment about the third head fake

thanks Margaret for drawing attention to this

-- 
Bill Kerr
http://billkerr2.blogspot.com/

On Thu, Mar 6, 2008 at 10:08 PM, Margaret Lawson <
margaret.lawson at konstantkaos.net> wrote:

> 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.cs.cmu.edu/%7Epausch/>
> http://www.alice.org/
>
>
> enjoy!
>
> Margaret
> (on leave from St. Michael's Grammar School)
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