I’ve spent the afternoon reading Randy Pausch’s inspirational book, The Last Lecture. He helped develop Alice, the Carnegie Mellon 3D programming world that makes it easy for people of all ages to create animations. It is a free service that millions have downloaded. To Randy, Alice “…is infinitely scalable. It’s scalable to the point where I can picture tens of millions of kids using it to chase their dreams. From the time we started Alice in the early 1990s, I’ve loved that it teaches computer programming by use of the head fake. Remember the head fake? That’s when you teach somebody something by having them think they’re learning something else. So students think they’re using Alice to make movies or create video games. The head fake is that they’re actually learning how to become computer programmers.”
I plan to play with the program this summer and introduce it to sudents next year. Thank you, Randy!
