Learn OOP with Alice - programming in a 3D environment

Thursday, December 27. 2007

Posted by Gerard Jensen in ICT in education at 15:23 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0)

Learn OOP with Alice - programming in a 3D environment

So you have your problems getting your head around object oriented programming? Well, you're certainly not alone - many computer science students that start with OOP have similar difficulties when turning to languages like Java or C++. One of the reasons may be that between "learning languages" like logo and modern OOP based programming languages there simply remains a large paradigm "gap".

Now researchers at the Carnegie Mellon University have created Alice as a programming tool to help bridge that gap - and just like you've been creating two-dimensional drawings with logo, you are now adding another dimension and end up creating 3D animations instead.

The cool thing about Alice is that you don't have to be enrolled at CMU in order to try it out - all you have to do is visit their website and choose between Alice 2.0 (designed with high-school students in mind and available for Windows, Linux and MACOS 10.3 and 10.4)) or choose the Storytelling Alice (only available for Windows machines) to get going.

Using an innovative "drag and drop programming" method, the student immediately creates animations while not having to worry about programming syntax - and which in turn already introduces you to concepts and prgramming styles found in Java. Alice and Java are indeed so close to each other, that a transition at a later stage becomes an easy step - so you really have a more than just "fun" way of learning to program here, as you can get your head around the concept of OOP first and then deal with all the little intricate details, including the correct positioning of semicolons and what not, at a later stage.

Since Allice is available free of charge (distributed under the Alice License), all you need to do is download a roughly 116MB (122MB in the case of Storytelling Alice) large ZIP file to get going. Storytelling Alice also comes with a handy Storytelling Alice Guide (a roughly 2MB download), that gets you and/or your students going in an instant.

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i would love to study programming but don't know were to start

#1 Raachman (Link) on 2008-09-26 12:08 (Reply)

Actually Alice is a good start, especially if you have no immediate idea as to what kind of programs you'd like zo program: simply start with some graphics, in this case 3D graphic objects that you can manipulate. Create a funny film with Alice - and as you progress to learn more, get more ambitious and start to develop you own little game.

Obviusly there is no single "entry point" into programming - it usually depends on what you need to achive with a computer, as that usually defines the environment you will be working in. If it is a website you'd like to create, you might want to start of with Javascript (quite important in a "Web 2.0 world" with loads of AJAX elements around) and PHP or Java (here: JSP or "Java Server Pages" - look for Tomcat on the Apache website as a servlet container to begin working). And if it's databases you want to create, you may just start with MS-Access or OpenOffice Base plus a bit of SQL, etc.

So essentially the answer to your problem of not knowing where to start is: you can start just about anywhere. And compared to days gone by, you have a whole bunch of programming languages to start with - most of them for free too.

You are also no longer bound to start from scratch with your programming experience, but rather have a "flying start" by having a look at existing open source projects - as the name implies, you not only get the application for free but usually (that may depend on the licensing model though) the source code and the license to modify the application to your liking.

All you have to do is take a first step - all else will come rushing at you as you start locating resources on the web to help you. Don't feel intimidated by complexity - after all, you learned to read and write without ever having read any of the gazillions of books too, didn't you? Stuff like the works of Shakespeare came much later - the same applies when you learn to program: nobody expects you to churn out complex business aplications right after you've written your first few lines of code.

Also, have a look at http://www.programmingtutorials.com/ for (free) materials that teach you to program in any of the many programming languages listed there. Starting is actually easy - the real problem may arise when you try to figure out where to stop again

#1.1 Gerard Jensen (Link) on 2008-09-26 19:10 (Reply)

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