Free Computer Programming for Middle School, High School & College Level Students

Alice, a computer programming software from Carnegie Mellon University, is an exciting educational find for middle schoolers, high schoolers, and college age students.  

Carnegie Mellon can certainly explain the program better than me. The following is from the Alice.org site:

Alice is an innovative 3D programming environment that makes it easy to create an animation for telling a story, playing an interactive game, or a video to share on the web. Alice is a freely available teaching tool designed to be a student's first exposure to object-oriented programming. It allows students to learn fundamental programming concepts in the context of creating animated movies and simple video games. In Alice, 3-D objects (e.g., people, animals, and vehicles) populate a virtual world and students create a program to animate the objects.

In Alice's interactive interface, students drag and drop graphic tiles to create a program, where the instructions correspond to standard statements in a production oriented programming language, such as Java, C++, and C#. Alice allows students to immediately see how their animation programs run, enabling them to easily understand the relationship between the programming statements and the behavior of objects in their animation. By manipulating the objects in their virtual world, students gain experience with all the programming constructs typically taught in an introductory programming course.

Alice comes in two different programs:

• The main program, Alice, was created for high schoolers and college age students by Carnegie Mellon University.
• Storytelling Alice was designed for middle schoolers (particularly girls) by a doctoral student at Carnegie Mellon University.

Ready to get started?  Here are a few quick links to helpful information (go to the main site, Alice.org, for these links and more):

• Promotional Videos on what Alice is and how to use it.
• Teacher Tutorials
• Community Forum where you'll find many answers to your questions
• Alice download (the one for high school to college age)
• Storytelling Alice download (for middle schoolers)

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Carnegie Mellon can certainly explain the program better than me. The following is from the Alice.org site:

Alice is an innovative 3D programming environment that makes it easy to create an animation for telling a story, playing an interactive game, or a video to share on the web. Alice is a freely available teaching tool designed to be a student's first exposure to object-oriented programming. It allows students to learn fundamental programming concepts in the context of creating animated movies and simple video games. In Alice, 3-D objects (e.g., people, animals, and vehicles) populate a virtual world and students create a program to animate the objects.

In Alice's interactive interface, students drag and drop graphic tiles to create a program, where the instructions correspond to standard statements in a production oriented programming language, such as Java, C++, and C#. Alice allows students to immediately see how their animation programs run, enabling them to easily understand the relationship between the programming statements and the behavior of objects in their animation. By manipulating the objects in their virtual world, students gain experience with all the programming constructs typically taught in an introductory programming course.

Alice comes in two different programs:

• The main program, Alice, was created for high schoolers and college age students by Carnegie Mellon University.
• Storytelling Alice was designed for middle schoolers (particularly girls) by a doctoral student at Carnegie Mellon University.

Ready to get started?  Here are a few quick links to helpful information (go to the main site, Alice.org, for these links and more):

• Promotional Videos on what Alice is and how to use it.
• Teacher Tutorials
• Community Forum where you'll find many answers to your questions
• Alice download (the one for high school to college age)
• Storytelling Alice download (for middle schoolers)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Subscribe to FreelyEducate here

Keep up with FreelyEducate tweets (Twitter) here: @freelyeducate