1. Alice the Free, Fun and Easy Way to Introduce Students to Programming Elaine Witkowski and Jill Nelson

2. Agenda Why use Alice? What is Alice? How to use Alice? Door Prize Where to get help? Door Prize When to use Alice? Door Prize

3. Why use Alice?

4. Motivation Would you like your students to volunteer to stay after school to learn programming?

5. Ryan- “I can be as creative as I want to in making animated video games”. Matt- “I like making animated movies!”

7. Enrichment Are you challenging your high ability students?

8. Aaron- “I like Alice because you get to make your own video games.”

10. Life Skills Do your students have the basic programming skills they are going to need in the 21 st Century?

11. Did you know that less than 1% of women list computer science as their major? College Prep

12. Pam “I can make the car move around.”

14. Career Paths Are you aware that studies have shown if girls don’t get interested in computer science in middle school they are unlikely to take it in high school?

15. Allison You can create your own ideas Tanner You can make your own virtual world.

17. What is Alice?

18. “Alice is a engaging, less frustrating teaching tool for introductory computing.” “Alice is an innovative 3D programming environment that makes it easy to create an animation for telling a story, or playing an interactive game, …” From http://www.alice.orghttp://www.alice.org

19. How do I use Alice?

20. No previous programming experience is necessary! We are not going to “overload” you with programming terminology during this presentation. It’s Easy!

21. Use Your Creativity! Tell a story or play a game A princess has been grounded by her father (a wizard). Being a rather rebellious princess, she has emailed the local dragon taxi service. The dragon will fly to the princess and she will climb aboard the dragon to escape from the castle – to meet some friends at the village dance club.

22. Examples of Visual Storyboards Because of time, we will create just the tiny part of the dragon flying.

23. Open Alice

24. Easy, Helpful Tutorials

25. Select Template

26. Adding the Objects Click on the green Add Objects button

27. Click on the “Yellow” Medieval Folder Add objects to the world Two options Drag and drop Click on thumbnail; then click on Add Instance button

28. Add Your Objects Click on the dragon then click on “add instance to world” Click on the castle then click on “add instance to world” Click on the princess then click on “add instance to world”

29. Once you have all of your objects click the green done button. When you are finished adding objects

30. Thank you Prentice Hall! Prentice Hall donated 4 Alice books totaling over $200 to give as prizes. Let’s give one away now!

31. Storyboard Steps Do together dragon rolls left wing up and to right dragon rolls right wing up and to left Do in order dragon takes off dragon flies to princess princess climbs on dragon's back and escapes How can a dragon "take off"? Do together dragon rolls wings down dragon moves up and forward

32. Highlight the Dragon Object

33. Both Wings Together You want both wings to go up together, so we are going to drag the “do together” box into the editor.

34. Dragging the code into the editor Click on the plus (+) besides the Dragon tile-you will now see all of the parts (objects) of the dragon

35. Left Wing Moves Up Click on the “ leftWing ”. The methods that the leftWing can perform are now listed below. Think of methods as “verbs” that objects “nouns” can perform.

36. Drag the “ leftWing roll ” by the left “dotted” tab into purple “Do Together” area. Choose “ right ” then “ other ” then type 0.02.

37. Right Wing Moves Up Click on the “ rightWing ”. The methods that the rightWing can perform are now listed below.

38. Drag the “ rightWing roll ” by the left “dotted” tab into purple “Do Together” area. Choose “ left ” then “ other ” then type 0.02

39. What you should see

40. Hit the “Play” button The Dragon’s wings should move up!

41. Another “Do Together” Now we want to wings to move down and the dragon to move up and forward We are going to need another “Do together” right below the first one

42. Reversing the Direction of the Wings Click on the left wing again under the Dragon object parts From the lower left hand corner drag leftWingroll and choose left and then 0.02 into the 2 nd Do Together area

43. Now the other wing is reversed Click on the right wing again under the Dragon object parts From the lower left hand corner drag rightWingroll and choose right and then 0.02 into the 2 nd Do Together area

44. Moving Up The entire dragon needs to move up so click on the dragon object in the upper left corner Now from the lower left corner drag dragon move to the 2 nd Do together and choose up and ½ meter

45. Moving Forward The entire dragon needs to move forward Now from the lower left corner drag dragon forward to the 2 nd Do together area and choose forward and 1 meter

46. The 2nd Do together should look like

47. Hit the “Play” button The Dragon’s wings should move up and down and he should fly up and forward!

48. Looping the Action The dragon only goes through his motions once. We want the dragon to fly further so we are going to add a “LOOP”. From the bottom of the screen drag the Loop to the top of the editor & choose 5

49. Final Steps Drag your code (both do togethers) into the loop. Grab the dotted areas to the left.

50. Hit the “Play” button The Dragon’s wings should move up and down and he should fly up and forward and move across the screen!

51. Congratulations! You just did animation!!!! You can make the dragon land or start a different story from your own imagination!

52. Thank you Prentice Hall! Prentice Hall donated 4 Alice books totaling over $200 to give as prizes. Let’s give one away now!

53. Where to get help?

54. Resources http://www.alice.org Free downloads Sign up for newsletter Message board http://www.aliceprogramming.net 2008 workshop information http://learnalice.googlepages.com Prentice Hall books

55. Thank you Carnegie Mellon! They donated the Alice software program. In conjunction with a NSF (National Science Foundation) grant they have held and continue to hold work shops. Permission was given to use the charts/graphs, the “edited” dragon example, and the Dragon and Alice Power Point templates.

56. Thank you Prentice Hall! Prentice Hall donated 4 Alice books totaling over $200 to give as prizes. Let’s give one away now!

57. Thank you Edutopia! Edutopia donated 20 magazines and gave permission to copy the article “Programming: The New Literacy” by Marc Prensky. Mr. Prensky gives multiple reasons why programming skills are needed for the 21 st century.

58. Thank you to our student animators! In order of appearance: Matt Ryan Aaron Pamella Tanner Allison

59. When should I use Alice? Now!

60. Coming Updates Alice 2.2 will have movie capability Alice 3.0/ Sims due out December 2008, you will be able to see Java code and it will have Sims characters courtesy of Electronic Arts!

61. Thank you Prentice Hall! Prentice Hall donated 4 Alice books totaling over $200 to give as prizes. Let’s give one away now!

62. Thank you for coming. This is the end of the presentation And the beginning of fun!!! Your Turn to Share

63. Encore? If we have time, we can share some more tips with you.

64. Position & Orientation Objects are positioned in 3-D space have a sense of orientation have six degrees of freedom (directions of movement)

65. Mouse Control Toolkit To re-position objects in the world, use the buttons in the mouse control toolkit

66. Quad View – Relative Positioning

67. Empty quad view pane? Scroll & Zoom controls can be used (usually) to reorient the camera view.

68. Did you lose your dragon? While you can use your camera controls to find your dragon, to save time today, just add a new dragon to your world. Also for future reference, you can “drop a dummy object” and the camera will be able to find it.

69. Memory Because of the graphics in Alice it takes up memory. Alice creates duplicate “back up” files which are not necessary if you do not have a lot of memory. How to turn off “back ups” (which takes up a lot of memory) go to Edit, then preference, then general tab