In a previous blog entry, I told you about SCRATCH, a free programming tool created by the MIT Media Lab. My children had a lot of fun using this program and it certainly whetted their appetite to learn more about game development. My older two sons, however, were on a quest for something more - 3D worlds!

So we moved on to Alice 2.0, a free 3D programming environment created by Carnegie Mellon University. The idea for Alice was conceived by Randy Pausch, the CMU professor known for his inspirational last lecture, Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams. Pausch and his team developed Alice as a way to make beginning programming more appealing to students.

“Alice is an innovative 3D programming environment that makes it easy to create an animation for telling a story, playing an interactive game, or a video to share on the web. Alice is a freely available teaching tool designed to be a student’s first exposure to object-oriented programming. It allows students to learn fundamental programming concepts in the context of creating animated movies and simple video games. In Alice, 3-D objects (e.g., people, animals, and vehicles) populate a virtual world and students create a program to animate the objects.”

Alice 2.0 is available (via free download) for PC, Mac, and Linux platforms. The standard Alice program is recommended for high school and college age students, however my 13 year old son was able to use this program without a lot of difficulty. The drag and drop interface and pre-loaded templates and objects make it easy to create 3-D Worlds. My son particularly enjoyed the medieval and city-building templates, and of course, the skateboarding park! (Take a peek at the available templates in Alice’s Objects Gallery.)

Another version of Alice, called Storytelling Alice, is recommended for middle school students, however this product captivated my 6 and 10 year old sons. The Storytelling Alice program was created by Caitlin Kelleher as part of her doctoral work in Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. It was designed to motivate middle school students, specifically girls, to learn programming skills by creating short 3D animated movies. (I found Ms. Kelleher’s research on Making Programming More Attractive to Middle School Girls, to be very interesting. You can also read more about her work here. Like the original version of Alice, Storytelling Alice offers a variety of pre-made scenes, characters and character actions that can be customized.

The Alice.org website offers a wealth of support for using the Alice programs, including free downloads of both Alice versions, a demonstration video, support forums, tutorials, and instructional materials. The site also has a lengthy database of schools who are currently using Alice. Of course I had to scan the list for homeschoolers - there were quite a few!

So what does the Gray family think of Alice? We LOVE it! My oldest son, using the traditional version of Alice, was off programming in no time, instructing his characters to carry out complicated movement sequences. In just a few hours he was able to program cool-looking dudes that careened down skateboarding ramps at daredevil speeds. His medieval sword battle was quite entertaining, especially when the princess was attacked by a dragon!

Those of us who don’t have a knack for this kind of thing (me) had to watch the tutorial and learn more before diving into the world of programming. My 10 year old and I watched the tutorial for Storytelling Alice and then worked on creating our animations. After about an hour we were able to create some pretty cool animations! My 10 year old was enthralled by this program and worked for hours to create his own library of clips.

Overall, I think both versions of Alice are excellent free tools and we will continue to use them. Thanks for this wonderful gift, CMU!

So what careers are in the future for the Gray boys? After working with SCRATCH and Alice 2.0, my 13 year old son is determined to keep working on his game design skills and attain his goal of video game designer. While still working with Alice, he is in the process of evaluating similar programming tools and is trying to determine which programming language he should learn first.

Thanks to the animations and character interactions in Alice Storytelling, my 10 year old son has become interested in storylines and character scripts. He has now turned his attention to writing a screenplay for a movie, so we have set him up with ScriptBuddy, a free web-based script-writing software platform.

And my 6 year old? We think he will best fit the role of a professional movie critic!

We’d love to hear about your experiences using Alice or Storytelling Alice. Please share your comments!