Introduction to Our Programming Tools Installing and exploring the programs

Downloading the Software Mr. Boburczak installed the necessary programs on all of the school laptops. If you would like the (free) programs on a personal computer or laptop, you need to download and install 3 files (though to start we will just need Alice 3) Alice 3 (http://www.alice.org/index.php?page=downloads/download_alice3.1) Latest Java Development Kit (JDK) (http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/jdk8- downloads-2133151.html choose your version from the first box) JCreator – ask Mrs. Patterson to email you the zipped installer file

What is Alice? Developed by a team at Carnegie Mellon – including Randy Pausch (The Last Lecture) Name in Honor of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Believed that the most important thing was to make things simple and fascinating for the learner. Alice 3 is the newest version of the software.

What is Alice? Alice makes it easy to create animations or interactive games. 3-D objects are placed into a scene. Then, students drag and drop program tiles to create a program to animate the scene. Students can immediately run their programs to see the relationship between the programming tiles and what they make happen in the program.

What is Java? Object-oriented programming language (the programs are made out of objects that interact with each other.) Very popular and portable (the programs don’t need to be recompiled to run on different computer platforms.) The programming tiles in Alice correspond closely to statements in Java. I will be exporting some of our Alice programs to a program called NetBeans so that we can explore the Java code underneath.

What is the JDK? Java Development Kit In order to compile and run Java programs that you write, you need the JDK on your computer. However, you will not need to interact with the JDK – it just needs to be there in the background!

What is JCreator? JCreator is a Java IDE (Interactive Development Environment) IDEs are somewhat like word processors for computer programs. You can write a letter in Word, Pages, Google Docs, etc. They all have different features, but they will each get the job done! JCreator is what we will use to write our Java programs It’s simple to use because it is “no frills”, but still allows you to do almost anything you could want in Java.