Alice

Alice is a programming language created by the Stage3 Research Group at Carnegie Mellon University. The purpose of Alice is to teach programming fundamentals in a visual, fun way. The magic of Alice is that students learn about objects, events, and programming structures using a 3D environment. This is not the norm.

Alice programming provides immediate feedback. Its visual nature allows students to see the effects of changes to their program, and with time, students learn to manipulate their objects and learn object oriented programming terminology and concepts. In this way, Alice exposure serves as a bridge to object oriented programming languages, such as Java.

There are currently two versions of Alice availalble. Alice 2.2. is stable and will be used in this class. Alice 3.0 is still in development but will soon be robust enough to use. Alice 3.0 is tied closely to Java, so much so that it can export Java code.

Here's the Alice programming promo video:

Alice: Programming for a New Generation

Baldwin Tutorial