What about Alice? (Alice 3.1)

Among the many things changed since a left i.ph for Blogspot I noticed how some old posts I had almost forgot have been somewhat “revived” in visitors interest once moved on the new platform. One of the posts is more or less regularly tapped is the one about Alice a Java-based educational software meant to teach kids programming. I so got curious and went back to Alice home page in order to see if any upgrade was available.

Alice 3.1

Installing Alice 3.1 is simple matter of starting the self-installing script downloaded.

sudo Alice3Installer-Online-3.1.58.0.0-linux.sh

the installation wizard guides through a very simple installation process where, apart from various “I agree” and “Forward”, the only real option available is the choice of the installation path.

Alice 3 (beta) on the EEEPC

To be a programmer might result a satisfying activity but hardly it can be defined “fun”. One can work for months to a project with no better reward than an error free log file. I'm not complaining of my job but I understand what makes it sometimes unpopular among students. Alice is an educational development environment that tries to make programming less boring to students by providing an easy way of writing programs that interact with a 3D game-like environment.

What's new in version 3

The key points in Alice are the easy user interface that let you program only by drag-and-drop operation, the availability of many easy methods to manipulate the 3D environment and a rich library of 3D objects and characters ready to be used in programs. In particular Alice version 3 provides an object library enriched by a subset of Electronics Arts™ SIMS 2™ characters.

Among the many improvements of Alice 3 the one that triggered my interest was the availability of a plug-in to import Alice projects in NetBeans, this makes easy using Java to interact with Alice 3D world.