BlogDale

Alice is a free programming environment from Carnegie Melon that anyone can learn quickly. Using drag and drop characters are added into a world then events and attributes can be assigned to them to make them move and/or respond to other events. Hey presto, it is possible to quickly build a 3D world with interactive characters and you just started Object Oriented Programming. (You really didn’t want to know the name of the process did you? Ignore it. Like Algebra. It’s not hard to do, but anything with a weird name is easy to deny knowledge of).

NASA never showed this on the out-takes

Check out the podcast interview

I found Alice a while ago, had a brief experiment on it and realised that it was way more fun to use than I expected. Using drag and drop to program onscreen characters in a 3D world takes so much of the technomancy out of programming, making it accessible to everyone. Lately I’ve been playing a bit more, and on a recent visit to Rickmansworth I spent some time with Drew Buddie’s son Euan (aged 10) showing him the basics (I only know the basics. We learned together). I then walked away and left him to it. In no time at all he’d experimented himself and created quite an elaborate scene involving the haunting of the moon.
One small step

The storyline was in his head and developed as he realised what could be done with the environment. In no time at all he’d got interactivity in there, making the astronaut leap into the air when clicked, and moving with the keyboard actions. As this functionality was discovered it allowed the story to become more complex, and Euan took off again on another hour of discovery and creation.

In a traditional ICT classroom activity I would have expected learners to develop a storyboard before starting to program, but experience has shown that stories developed like this are always way too elaborate for the programming skills. The story and the skills develop together, and I think that both need to feed each other - the storyboard starts off with a basic premise but as more skill is developed the stories can be modified to become more or less elaborate. Using the digital skills that they have, learners could develop their own digital storyboard that grows as their programming skills develop, allowing them to become active and reflective learners. It strikes me that developing a story like this is an ideal use for a wiki, and reflection on what has been done and recording critical points is an ideal use of a personal blog. Roll on the day when these are more widely used in schools.

I’m looking forward to seeing how Euan’s learning with Alice develops - he’s going to be programming games in no time at all without having the hassle of having to learn programming structures - they will come in time when the game gets more elaborate.