After my post yesterday on programming with Christian, our new friend Ruthie left a comment about a program called Alice. I checked into it and it sounds pretty amazing. Alice is a program that was developed at Carnegie Mellon to teach kids how to program. Here is their homepage blurb:
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 teaching tool for introductory computing. It uses 3D graphics and a drag-and-drop interface to facilitate a more engaging, less frustrating first programming experience.
Before Christian and I jump into our big project I am going to have him download Alice 2.0, a program designed for high school and college kids. The thing that is cool about it (beside that it runs on Linux, Windows and Macs) is that it also involves storytelling, 3D graphics, and visual programming. Wow! I watched the promotional video and I think I am going to have Kelly play with the thing, too. It is very, very cool.
Thanks for the GREAT tip Ruthie!
In that vein, I am going to have six or eight hours to myself tomorrow. The final (very long) swim meet of the year is tomorrow. I am only needed when it is time to spectate; the kids will be spending the time between events playing games with their teammates. I am going to go into the YMCA and work on the Betty Blonde comic webpage so it is easier to use and more interactive by adding some JavaScript. We hope we have some time to go to the library, but the swim meet will probably run too long. On Sunday, the final YMCA swim team party will take place. We should be able to get there just a little bit late after our Gospel meeting on Sunday afternoon.
Update: Ruthie just sent a comment that noted that Rand Pausch, one of the authors of Alice died to day. We all really enjoyed his very famous “last lecture” shown in the YouTube video below: