Wednesday, January 23, 2008

Alice - Free Open Source Educational Software for teaching computer programming in 3D environment

The mission of the Alice project is to increase and sustain the pipeline of computer science graduates, essential to the growth of technology in a global economy.

Alice is an innovative 3D programming environment for building animations in the form of stories, games, and web-ready videos. Alice teaches programming. Alice version 2.0 is in common use. Alice 3.0 is in active development with a projected launch date of August 2009.

Alice 2.0 has been very successful and enjoyed an adoption rate of 10% in US colleges and is expanding rapidly into high schools. We expect Alice 3.0 to surpass this mark considerably.

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, 3D objects (e.g., people, animals, and vehicles) populate a virtual world and students create a program to animate these objects.

Alice 3.0 will also enable teachers and students to work directly with underlying Java code in a Java IDE. The ability to work with code in either drag-and-drop or in Java IDE mode will support an expansion of Alice 2.0's target populations (previously, high school and pre-CS1) to include CS1 and AP-CS courses. Alice 3.0 is scheduled for alpha and beta testing in a limited number of classrooms during the '08-'09 academic year.

http://www.alice.org/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXOyd68saIM

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