Alice.org Programing HIGHLY RECOMENDED

[PEO]

Hi,

 

Just a quick software recomendation Alice.org

 

Alice is an innovative 3D programming environment that makes it easy to create an animation for telling a story, playing an interactive game, or a video to share on the web. Alice is a freely available teaching tool designed to be a student's first exposure to object-oriented programming. It allows students to learn fundamental programming concepts in the context of creating animated movies and simple video games. In Alice, 3-D objects (e.g., people, animals, and vehicles) populate a virtual world and students create a program to animate the objects.

 

In Alice's interactive interface, students drag and drop graphic tiles to create a program, where the instructions correspond to standard statements in a production oriented programming language, such as Java, C++, and C#. Alice allows students to immediately see how their animation programs run, enabling them to easily understand the relationship between the programming statements and the behavior of objects in their animation. By manipulating the objects in their virtual world, students gain experience with all the programming constructs typically taught in an introductory programming course.

 

We are going to start using this in the next couple of weeks to introduce programing to KS3 students.

Edited November 18, 2008 by PEO

[Domino]

How can you recommend something you've not released for kiddies yet....?

[matt40k]

Mmm... works with SIMS 2. Missus will like this.

[flyinghaggis]

We tried the software a couple of years ago but IIRC correctly we couldn't get it to run without setting group policy on our computers so that non-admin users could see the "C:\" drive (we hide it by default). Our computing dept are still keen to use it but we can't really change a policy as fundamental as that for a single piece of software.

 

Does anyone know if they've fixed this problem yet?

Edited November 18, 2008 by flyinghaggis

[PEO]

How can you recommend something you've not released for kiddies yet....?

 

Because a teacher can use it . Have it setup on the network here and its fab.

[tech_guy]

It looks good - going to have a fiddle with it when I can.

[Mr.Ben]

Both versions of alice try to write application data to the desktop.

 

If like me you redirect the desktop to a read only share this presents a problem.

 

The trick is to run a vbs script before the program loads to change the user shell folders desktop registry entry to the users home drive, as this is applied by GPO when the user logs on changing it seems to make no difference for my users once they have logged on.

 

Obviously this change is reversed the next time someone logs on.

[elsiegee40]

To me, Alice is long-established Library software produced by Softlink: Softlink Europe - Solutions : Alice Edited December 8, 2008 by elsiegee40