My Opera
Storing Telling Alice
Thursday, April 9, 2009 5:03:12 AM
After a little poking around... I came across 'Story Telling Alice' ( after a friend suggesting I look into Visual Programming Languages. This is a nifty little program that seemed to fully engage my daughter through it's tutorial, and left her able to dig around and perform some simple programming tasks.
The product is available via www.alice.org.
It provides a 3D storybook environment in which object oriented programming is taught at a very high level. As a visual programming language, my daughter is not burdened with the needle in the haystack issues of figuring out which character in the text is missing or misplaced... ( we tried a little Ruby via a website and had no end of fun trying to guess if we needed to close a single quote, or double quote after I was too imprecise in my instruction. )
Anyway, there are flow of control constructs, many base objects and scenes to build a story in by selecting the actors and objects in the scense and composing more complex, combination behaviors and scripting those together...
I'll have to come up with more lesson plans for her. After she worked through the tutorial, I had to pry her away.
Unfortunately, Story Telling Alice did not work on my Vista machine very well out of the box..( zipfile ) I had to replace the JRE distributed with it. I did this the easy way. I dropped a 1.6 jre inplace of the 1.5 that is bundled, but I renamed the 1.6 jre so it was in the same named directory as the alice.exe and other materials would expect.
The product is available via www.alice.org.
It provides a 3D storybook environment in which object oriented programming is taught at a very high level. As a visual programming language, my daughter is not burdened with the needle in the haystack issues of figuring out which character in the text is missing or misplaced... ( we tried a little Ruby via a website and had no end of fun trying to guess if we needed to close a single quote, or double quote after I was too imprecise in my instruction. )
Anyway, there are flow of control constructs, many base objects and scenes to build a story in by selecting the actors and objects in the scense and composing more complex, combination behaviors and scripting those together...
I'll have to come up with more lesson plans for her. After she worked through the tutorial, I had to pry her away.
Unfortunately, Story Telling Alice did not work on my Vista machine very well out of the box..( zipfile ) I had to replace the JRE distributed with it. I did this the easy way. I dropped a 1.6 jre inplace of the 1.5 that is bundled, but I renamed the 1.6 jre so it was in the same named directory as the alice.exe and other materials would expect.
Matthew Splettcubicz # Thursday, April 9, 2009 5:13:59 AM
Matthew Splettcubicz # Sunday, April 12, 2009 4:07:39 AM
Now that has made several 'movies' with it, I'll have to write some challenges for her.
ways for her to learn different flow of control constructs, such as looping, which would lead well toward thinking about breaking the code up into appropriate methods.