What is Alice?

Alice is a tool to teach programming skills to people who has never programmed before. It is a development environment based on scripts to produce 3D scenes. The developer creates characters (objects) and starts to add functionality (method) to the character using the drag-and-drop features of the Swing interface. After creating the scene, the student can export the Java code that produces the characters animation.

Who should use Alice?

Anyone without programming skills, like mid-school students and first year college students.

And how is the adoption of Alice?

Alice is only on its beta stage, but we have around a thousand downloads per week. I would say we have 10 to 15% of the American universities using it.

Is it open-source? Who is paying for Alice?

Alice is part of a Carnegie Melon research group founded by Randy Pausch (The Last Lecture). It is open.source and hosted at java.net under the GPL license.

Special features?

There are a lot of interesting tricks in the application, but the focus is on the learning of the users - what we believe it is very good. Eletronic Arts donated the characters, so we have a more attractive GUI - when people recognize the characters they get more interested in play with them.

Is it possible to export the animations in mpeg or other format? It may be awesome for marketing.

In the beta version it is not available but we are working to provide these features.

The students feedback

While my short interview at the Alice booth, a student approached the booth and then I collected some real world feedback:

1. Hello, what's your name and what you do?

   I am Kira Morrow, a student of Camden County College (New Jersey ).

   What you thing about Alice?

   Impressive program, I like because it teaches the basics of programming and do stimulates the thinking instead of focusing in programming languages syntax.

2. Hello, what's your name and what you do?

   I am Josh Kitterman - a Software Engineer from Salt Lake City, Utah

   So, what you think about Alice?

   I am excited about that because I have 2 kids (7 and 5 years old) I am looking to teach programming skill to them.

   Seriously? It isn't too early to that?

   I don't think so, it is a good time to introduce programming at this age with a fancy graphical interface. They will like it.

   I noticed you coded some scenes. How long did it take to settle the environment and get it working?

   From installation to final animation: 2 hours.

   And how was it? Very easy? Any bug?

   A few crashes because it is beta, but nothing serious. It is very easy of use tool, you should try it.