[video] The Last Lecture - Randy Pausch

[SYNACK]

I just watched the aptly titled Last lecture from Randy Pausch, a Computer Science professor at Carnegie Mellon University. As posted on Slashdot he has just died at the age of 47. He was invited to speak at the annual lecture series where each year a professor started out with the premise that if this was their last lecture what would they say, this was a very real question as he had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and given six months to live.

 

The topic of the lecture is Achieving Your Childhood Dreams but turns into much more and is a good watch, it has currently been watched around 4.3 million times on youtube.

 

Randy Pausch Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams

 

He has contributed a lot to the development of virtual reality and was instrumental in creating a masters degree for digital entertainment that appears to be very influential.

 

Another project that he created sounds as if it could be useful in schools and help make learning to program into a story telling exercise in a 3d environment. This project is called Alice and is still under development and is up to version 3, it includes characters from the SIMS games and is free:

 

Alice.org

 

There is also a version aimed at smaller children and is apparently more appealing to girls in its methods:

http://www.alice.org/kelleher/storytelling/

Edited July 27, 2008 by SYNACK

[russdev]

A great post thank you another video to watch...

 

Russ

[imiddleton25]

We downloaded and installed storytelling Alice Earlier this year as they ran a competition for Junior schools. Looks like good fun the children enjoyed using it.

[SYNACK]

We downloaded and installed storytelling Alice Earlier this year as they ran a competition for Junior schools. Looks like good fun the children enjoyed using it.

 

Good to hear that the program lives up to its hype, what age bracket were the children that you had using it?

[russdev]

Again a thank you managed to watch the video today today a very good lecture the ending is genius (won't discuss so that don't do any spoilers etc).

 

Russ

[pooley]

I was going to have an early(ish) night, but started watching this and over an hour later was still glued right till the end. Well worth watching.