[K12OSN] OT: Alice.org

[Tom Hoffman]

On 10/17/07, Huck <dhuckaby at paasda.org> wrote:

> honestly Alice looked like more of a, "Johnny, you're done with all of
> your work? Great! You can go use the computer and make a nice little
> story of Jack and the Beanstalk using Alice."

To be fair, what Alice is designed for is to allow non-prorgrammers at
Carnegie Mellon to create 3-d applications.  It isn't trivial, but it
also is not literally designed to teach programming (it would actually
be more correct to say it is designed to NOT teach programming).  But
it is sophisticated in its own way and scratches the author's itch.

There was a proposal written (like, six years ago) by Guido van Rossum
(the creator of Python) and others to get funding to create a version
of Alice aimed at teaching programming to secondary students, but it
never got off the ground.

--Tom