Alice.org – What is Alice?

Would you want your kids to develop an understanding of programing?  Well check out Alice.org.  Carnegie Mellon Professors and IT Specitalists have created a free 3D envirtonment for kids to learn programming.  What a great idea! Very much like Scratch from MIT.  It is a simple programming application for students to do just that.  Download and install for free.  Get students started on building content from a new perspective…. a 3D virtual perspective.  Exactly where they live today.  Virtual, digital natives would love the opportunity to use this in school.  Give it a shot!!

“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.”

How can you not want to try this one?  Carnegie