On the way back from summer vacation (August 2008) I was stuck in a small airport that had no decent books to purchase for the return plane journey, so I bought the latest copy of Time magazine available. On one of the pages it had an article explaining that Randy Pausch had died. Randy was on the staff at CMU (Carnegie Mellon University) in Pittsburgh and had been diagnosed with severe cancer (in his mid 40's). In September 2007 Randy delivered his last lecture (now also a web site). The article explained that his lecture had been watched by millions on the Internet. I had not heard of Randy or the lecture even though I had been in and out of CMU in the years prior with the SEI (Software Engineering Institute) working on their CMM (Capability Maturity Model) for software. My interest was peaked. At the next airport my son bought me Randy's book and I read it on the last leg of the plane journey home. When I got home I watched Randy's last lecture on YouTube. Wow - if you have not done so you should spend the 40 or so minutes and watch Randy's last lecture. In fact you should consider having your family watch the lecture. The lecture is titled - "Achieving your childhood dreams".

So what has all this to do with … "Alice is teaching children how to write computer programs - and they do not even know it!"?

In his book Randy talked passionately about a project he was involved in at CMU. Alice allows children to create an animation (a type of cartoon movie not unlike the SIMS) to tell a story. It is pretty cool if you are a young person to create your own movie. After all you are well used to playing computer games full of animation. The really neat thing is that you do not really know but you are doing so in an environment just like an IDE (integrated development environment). It is wild! My 9 year old son started with Story Telling Alice which is designed for children in middle school. Today (a very wet and dreary Sunday - weather wise at least) we loaded Alice 2.0 which is designed for students in High School. It did not seem much more advanced than Story Telling Alice. Together we went through the 4 tutorials and then started to write our first animation together. In the Alice environment children / students play and have fun and at the same time (without really knowing it) get comfortable with the basic computer programming constructs (like environments, classes, objects, methods, events, loops, if/else, etc.). One of the major objectives of Alice is to get computer science students (where there is a high failure rate in 1st year programming assignments) comfortable with the base constructs. The students who go this path (playing with Alice first) have a much higher success rate.

For adults with young children who love to play computer games and where you are worried some of this computer games time is mindless - this is fun but educational game for them to play with. I recommend Alice!

In the next version Alice will be teaming up with characters from Electronic Arts' hit video game, The Sims™ 2.