Professor Randy Pausch, Human Computer Interaction, Computer Science, and Design Director at Carnegie Melon University has forever changed the way computer programing and computer science is taught. He has developed a program called the Alice Project that makes it easy to create an animation for story-telling, playing interactive games, and creating a video to share on the web. He has been working in the areas of human computer interaction, virtual reality, entertainment technology, and novel teaching approaches to introductory computer programing at the university since the early 80's. His latest program, the Alice project, is a freely available teaching utensil designed to be a student's first experience to object-oriented programming. It teaches students the basic and necessary programming concepts in the context of creating animated movies and simple video games. The Alice program uses the drag-and-drop graphic tiles to create a simple program. Alice instantly allows students to see how their program runs and makes any mistakes immediately noticeable so they can quickly be corrected. In a recent interview Pausch stated, "Learning to program computers is hard. While part of this is intrinsic, other aspects of learning to program are unnecessarily hard. Specifically, students often struggle over both syntax and the inability to see the state of their program variables as their program runs. Alice has been distributed to over 1,000,000 users, and a textbook "Learning to Program with Alice" (Dann, Cooper, and Pausch) is now available from Prentice-Hall. In collaboration with Electronic Arts, the third version of Alice will use the 3D characters and animations from "The Sims".

Free Hit Counter