Status of the Alice Project
Way back in September, 2007, at about the time of Randy Pausch’s “Last Lecture”, I wrote an article about the future of his Alice v3 Project. In the wake of Diane Sawyer’s Primetime special on Randy last night, I thought it a good time to give an update on the project’s status.
As I wrote back in September, many of us in the Computer Science Department are committed to finding a way to finish Alice v3. This is a commitment shared by the Human-Computer Interaction Institute, the School of Computer Science, and Carnegie Mellon University. I also take this commitment personally, in part from watching watching my son explore and learn basic programming concepts while “playing” with Alice v2.
So, what has happened since September? First, we followed through on hiring Wanda Dann, to complete her part of the work on the pedagogy of Alice v3 and to help oversee the completion of the software. Second, we have mobilized the university administration to help raise the funds needed to support the development team.
The project still has a ways to go, but is making excellent progress. Previews of Alice 3 were given at the technical symposium of ACM’s SIGCSE (Special Interest Group for Computer Science Education) and also at the Microsoft Conference on Game Development in Computer Science Education. These previews went extremely well and generated very large amounts of interest. In a way, this causes problems because the availability of the Alice v3 system, incorporating The Sims technology from Electronic Arts, is still months away. But the interest level bodes well for the future.
Alice v3 is expected to undergo closely controlled alpha testing in the Fall of 2008 at a number of universities, including Carnegie Mellon, Ithaca College, and Saint Joseph’s University. In December, 2008, a beta version will be released to about 50 universities, 4-year colleges, and high schools for testing in a variety of environments and course settings. Instructors from participating schools will attend a one-day workshop in December to receive a copy of the software, interact with members of the Alice team, and learn about the results of the alpha test.
As always, there is the question of funding. At this moment, we believe that we have enough funding to keep the team going at least past the alpha test, and fundraising from several sources, including government agencies, foundations, corporations, and individuals, continues. We don’t know at this point how successful we’ll be with this, but as with the software and textbook development, we are committed to doing the work necessary to make the case. Contributions to the Pausch Fund directly help this cause.
We are extremely proud to be a part of this core aspect of Randy Pausch’s legacy. We know that it will improve the opportunities for many, many young people around the world. To understand more about the impact that Randy has had specifically on Carnegie Mellon, see the WQED special by Mike Lee, available online and periodically re-broadcasted.
Peter Lee @ April 10, 2008
I use Story Telling Alice with my two boys 5 and 9 years old. They prefer it over Alice (maybe because I started them on STA first). I am really excited about Alice 3 for a number of reasons.
IMHO, you need to really branch out w/the Alice 3.0 project in a Wikinomics sort of way.
a. Why not put this project on Sourceforge and make it open. You would probably get thousands of dads like me involved on the project.
b. Promote the project in a more collaborative model. First off Alice.org should be Wiki based. Also collaborative development forums should be set up to promote specific goals. See..
https://secure3.verticali.net/pg-connection-portal/ctx/noauth/0_0_1_4_83_4_3.do
http://www.yet2.com/app/about/about/members
c. Move this project out of an institutional education mindset. I think everyone agrees that Alice is a great tool for institutional “computer programming” education however, there are great opportunities beyond that niche.
d. Make the education course material Open Source. Follow your own industries lead on this one.
I am certain that any number of these actions would produce a windfall of donations. Just the announcement of any of the items listed above could create a viral effect. At the risk of sounding cynical… the time is now…
johnmwillis.com/alice
[…] topics to write about has started to pile up. There are updates to report on the status of the Alice Project. Also, there were a number of interesting meetings, including the CRA Board of Directors, the […]