CMU Alice and Randy Pausch
Dave and I went to the HCII at CMU today to hear a presentation on a project called Alice. This project in designed to make the joys of programming accessibly to everyday non-technical people. The talk was given by Randy Pausch the founder of the project and also a great speaker.
This is intriguing to me because my ultimate goal is to teach and the premise of this project is to teach the principles of programming. In a nutshell it is a simple to use system in which a user can create programs that control objects in a 3d space. It allows a novice user to quickly learn the concepts of loops, if-then logic, events, and other programming fundamentals. This is presented in such a way that a 13 year old could use it. The example given is the motion control of an ice skater. It allows the user to learn how to program a statement such as “if the ice skater gets 1 meter from the hole then fall down else skate forward”. So without forcing variable scooping or other confusing language specific syntax concepts, the student is still learning the fundamentals. The software also gives the users the ability to program using sub-routines and event driven logic. The guys at HCII are currently re-factoring this program for use in high schools. I strongly believe that if a teacher can convey programming basics to a 13 year-old then at 18 that student will be much more likely to choose computer science as a major in college. That means more people working in the profession that creates more growth in the area of computer science that in turn making me very excited. To think how fast technology moves today and to think that we can still go faster! It made me want to go join the team of developers working on this project (if they would let me).
The downloads available on www.alice.org doesn’t appear to be up to date. The downloads are running a VB GUI using Direct 3d for displaying the graphics. The version I saw today utilizes a Java swing application and is much easier to use. I’m not sure why the java version is not on their site but if I find it I’ll make another post.