My Opera
How does this teach me to program?
Saturday, April 18, 2009 3:44:28 PM
After letting my duaghter play with Story Telling Alice for several days, she has become adept at using it to produce scripts for a movie with dialog and character animation. Then she asked, "Dad, how does Alice teach me to program?"
So knowing very little about 'how' to do anything in particular in Alice, I sat down with her and asked her to do a series of things... Create a new stage.. add an actor, make the actor do some sequence of silly behavior.
Awesome she can do all that with ease. This is much like writing linear script code where the only concern is doing things in the write order.
Then I asked her to add a new method to the actor, and move the silly behavior into the method.
Then replace the stage script with a simple call to that method.
To show the benefit of this, I had her add a loop to the stage script and move the silly behavior call into it.. See, how much easier it is to move one method call than it would have been to move an entire sequence? She agreed it was better.
To highlight better even more, we then edited the silly behavior, to make it more complex and refined... ( actor simultaniously falls down and shouts a silly word ) then looks forward for a few seconds, and gets back up.
Now we've modified the actor to have a unique behaviorial characteristic, that can be easily re-used in different situations, so we are on our way to writing slapstick commedies. But wait, there is more you can do...
A long wait on the ground would be tedious to the veiwer after a while... but if it is only occasionally long, it is funny. So we should parameterize the wait on the silly behavior.. "easy peasy" to quote a friend. With Alice it was intuitive as to how to do that.
So then we changed our call in the stage script to pass in a value computed in a loop that and repeated the duration of the fall... And that last part felt like programming to her. Although it was not particularly entertaining.
I think I'd like to propose that she try and create something of a 'choose your own adventure' style game/story. Alice has some basic user input capabilities. We'll see if we can put them to use.
So knowing very little about 'how' to do anything in particular in Alice, I sat down with her and asked her to do a series of things... Create a new stage.. add an actor, make the actor do some sequence of silly behavior.
Awesome she can do all that with ease. This is much like writing linear script code where the only concern is doing things in the write order.
Then I asked her to add a new method to the actor, and move the silly behavior into the method.
Then replace the stage script with a simple call to that method.
To show the benefit of this, I had her add a loop to the stage script and move the silly behavior call into it.. See, how much easier it is to move one method call than it would have been to move an entire sequence? She agreed it was better.
To highlight better even more, we then edited the silly behavior, to make it more complex and refined... ( actor simultaniously falls down and shouts a silly word ) then looks forward for a few seconds, and gets back up.
Now we've modified the actor to have a unique behaviorial characteristic, that can be easily re-used in different situations, so we are on our way to writing slapstick commedies. But wait, there is more you can do...
A long wait on the ground would be tedious to the veiwer after a while... but if it is only occasionally long, it is funny. So we should parameterize the wait on the silly behavior.. "easy peasy" to quote a friend. With Alice it was intuitive as to how to do that.
So then we changed our call in the stage script to pass in a value computed in a loop that and repeated the duration of the fall... And that last part felt like programming to her. Although it was not particularly entertaining.
I think I'd like to propose that she try and create something of a 'choose your own adventure' style game/story. Alice has some basic user input capabilities. We'll see if we can put them to use.
