Alice // a FREE gift from Carnegie Mellon
In late 2008, I read the late Randy Pausch’s “The Last Lecture”. In it, Randy talked about one of his favorite teaching techniques being “the head fake”. In other words, getting people to do something without them realizing that they are learning. I’ve thought about, and tried various head fake techniques for coaching football and teaching martial arts.
One of Randy’s creations is www.alice.org It is designed to be a fun interactive way for people to create and share 3D stories/videos or simple video games. It is aimed as teaching the fundamental concepts of Object Oriented Programming…without those using it knowing that they are programming.
My son Bryce was looking for something to create for the school’s upcoming science fair (or now called Creativity Conference). I remembered Alice and downloaded it for him this Sunday.
Since, he has spent over 10 hours on the computer putting together a story about Cows on the Moon. I’ll publish it out here when he finishes (likely middle of March). I think it’s wonderful that without knowing it, my 10 year old is learning about Methods, Classes, Inheritance, Passing Variables, Do While and If Then Else Loops…How awesome that will be for his future. So much more advanced than the PRINT and GOTO statements I wrote in BASIC when I was his age.
If I had more time, I would love to volunteer at the school and lead a course on using this tool. I think it would also benefit kids to learn how to work together towards a common goal where we could explore the realities of requirements gathering, iterations, design, build, test, implement…along with issue resolution and risk mitigation. Mark that down as my speech if I win this weeks Powerball.
