I know, the title of this post and the figure above are very misleading. Any school going kid or in fact anyone would think: "What's wrong with this guy? How the hell can someone forget the title of Alice in Wonderland?" Well, I am here not to discuss the famous novel by Lewis Carroll nor it's multi-million dollar grossing film adaptation. Following the tradition of GeekyVerses this is still a tech post.
Okay, let me give you some background to this post. I happened to see a video recently, The Last Lecture: Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams by Randy Pausch. Oh boy, this was the best last lecture or I must say the best lecture ever! Randy Pausch, a Computer Science professor who was suffering from terminal pancreatic cancer discusses his philosophies in life and also some amazing projects he worked on.
Alice is one of them. "It 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 teaching tool for introductory computing. It uses 3D graphics and a drag-and-drop interface to facilitate a more engaging, less frustrating first programming experience." That is the introduction given on the Alice's website. To sum it up, it is a pretty cool tool for a beginner interested in programming and animation. It is basically for school kids but I would recommend it to any beginner.
The interface is very intuitive and easy to use. It has drag and drop tools to make programming both a fun and educative experience. It is a little buggy which is acceptable, considering it's open source nature. It is a Java based tool following an Object-Oriented approach.
Alice has already made it's way into many schools. It can be used to make simple computer animations simultaneously learning various programming methodologies. Let's spread the word and encourage such OSS.
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