The
developers of Alice have
introduced a new version of their free drag-and-drop development tool
as well as an online tutorial to help young students learn how to
perform object-oriented programming.
Created
at Carnegie Mellon
University, Alice is a 3D programming environment that lets the
user create animations and simple video games. The new version, Alice
2.4, is intended for students in lower grades; another edition, Alice
3.1, is primarily geared to learners in higher grade levels and
universities.
The
new version was released to coincide with this month's international
"Hour of Code,"
which ran Dec. 9 through 15 during Computer
Science Education Week. That event is intended to introduce
students as young as 6 to the basic concepts of computer science,
demystify code, and show kids that they can become developers. The
initiative is backed by multiple online self-guided tutorials that
can be run on a browser, tablet or smartphone or used "unplugged"
in classrooms without computers.
The
Alice project has contributed an Hour
of Code tutorial specifically using the new version. In the
lesson, students learn how to set up scenes using characters and
props and write program code for creating the animation of the
characters within the scene.
The new version of Alice includes multiple
feature tweaks and bug fixes, but the biggest change is the addition
of characters from the Garfield comic strip, which can be used within
the programs created by the students.
Wanda Dann, director of the Alice Project, said
Alice is used in more than 15 percent of colleges and universities
and has become a "popular teaching tool" in secondary
schools. She said she expects the addition of Garfield, which appears
in 2,100 newspapers around the world, to extend that reach to new
students.
At
the K-12 level Alice has been used by teachers at The
Potomac School in McLean, VA and Desert
Academy in Santa Fe, NM, among others.
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