www.alice.org
Presented by
Don Slater and
Wanda Dann
Lecture: March 8, 9-9:45am
"Hello World"
Workshop (Alice: An Introduction to Programming Using 3D
Graphics): March 9, 9-10:30am
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.
In Alice's interactive interface, students drag and drop graphic
tiles to create a program, where the instructions correspond to
standard statements in a production oriented programming language,
such as Java, C++, and C#. Alice allows students to immediately see
how their animation programs run, enabling them to easily
understand the relationship between the programming statements and
the behavior of objects in their animation. By manipulating the
objects in their virtual world, students gain experience with all
the programming constructs typically taught in an introductory
programming course.