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'Alice' is a free open source^[1] object-oriented educational programming language with an associated development environment. It is developed over Squeak (a dialect of Smalltalk). Alice uses a drag and drop environment to create computer animations using 3D models. The software is developed by Carnegie Mellon to address three core problems in educational programming:^[2]
# Most programming languages are designed to be usable for "production code" thus introduce additional complexity. Alice is designed solely to teach programming.
# Alice is conjoined with its IDE. There is no syntax to remember. However, it supports the full object-oriented, event driven model of programming.
# Alice is designed to appeal to specific subpopulations not normally exposed to computer programming, such as middle school girls, by encouraging storytelling through a simple drag-and-drop interface.
In controlled studies at Ithaca College and Saint Joseph's University looking at students with no prior programming experience taking their first computer science course, the average grade went from a C to a B and the retention increased from 47% to 88%.^[3]
Alice 3.0 is being underwritten by Electronic Arts and will utilize character models from the The Sims 2.^[4]
The current release of Alice, version 2.0, runs on Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and Linux platforms.

Contents

See also

References

External links

See also

★ Educational programming language

★ Visual programming language

★ Logo

★ Squeak

References

1. Alice uses an attribution required version of the BSD license [1]
2. http://www.alice.org/whatIsAlice.htm
3. M. Moskal, D. Lurie, and S. Cooper, Evaluating the Effectiveness of a New Instructional Approach. In Proceedings of 2004 SIGCSE Conference, (Norfolk, VA).
4. http://www.alice.org/simsannounce.html


★ Learning to Program with Alice, Wanda P. Dann, Stephen Cooper, Randy Pausch: ISBN 0-13-187289-3

★ An Introduction to Programming Using Alice, Charles W. Herbert ISBN 1-4188-3625-7

★ Alice 2.0: Introductory Concepts and Techniques; Gary B. Shelly, Thomas J. Cashman, Charles W. Herbert ISBN 1-4188-5934-6

External links

★ Alice homepage

★ old version of Alice (Alice 99)

★ Stephen Cooper's research