Lance and Danette

Lance and Danette

Monday, September 15, 2008

The Alice Project


As many of you know I became very interested in the story of Randy Pausch and his journey as a terminal cancer patient. That would be the "simplistic" view. In the course of following his treatment, I began to really look at his life and the work he had done at Carnegie Mellon University. During several lectures, Randy mentioned the The Alice Project - a software application which uses 3D programming to create animation in a much more friendly environment for teens. It involves lots of drag and drop techniques v. throwing a student into trying to develop and author lines of code. http://www.alice.org/ While Dann, Cooper and Pausch's project sounded like a phenomenal learning tool, I must admit it flew right past me as I have no interest at all in programming. I took Pascal at UF for about 5 minutes and it probably ruined me forever. I kept leaving off that damn ";" or "." or "//" and my one tiny little line of program would NEVER run ... And yet, the Alice Project kept coming up over the course of the last year - kind of tugging at me.

Last night Darby was frustrated because he wanted to make his own "Stickman" animation... he had the story line down, what his bad and good guys looked liked, the music he wanted in the background - but he couldn't find the software to make his vision real. Then the Alice Project popped into my head.... we looked at the application together. Tonight we will download the 2.0 version for Windows which is FREE compliments of Carnegie Mellon! Darby is interested in Computer Science as he wants to eventually design and build video games as well as other 3D animated projects - unfortunately there is no curriculum offering in programming right now for 6th graders - middle school. Alice might be a perfect solution for him and his curiosity, and willingness to learn. If it turns out that one of the reasons for being drawn to Randy and his story was to discover a way for Darby to accomplish his goals of one day becoming a Computer Science major, how serendipitous - what a "God" thing - how truly magical would that be?

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