Anyone with experience using Alice?

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I'm taking a couple of computer classes next semester.
One will be a digital media class using Illustrator and Photoshop.

The other is an intro to programming using Alice.
LINK--->ALICE

Has anyone here ever used this?

I've had the book and cd since last year trying to get myself to work on it.
Now that I'll be taking the class in January, I want to start working on it for sure.
It really helps me to be a bit ahead with this stuff so I can make it through to the end of the class.

Thanks

well, do you mean Alice the program for library cataloging? coz when i was at school (few months or so) we had a cataloging system called Alice. now i dont know much about it, coz i just looked up books and stuff in there and didnt use it much, but i can give you the email address of my friend who is still at school and she's a librarian too. maybe she can help you

Naw, I mean the program I linked to above... it's overseen by Carnegie Mellon Univeristy and it's an intro to learning computer programming.

The original idea, I believe, was to have this program that allowed the student to learn/understand the basic concepts of programming without having to learn a language.
The student would do this for the first portion of the class... say half a semester... then switch over to something like JAVA.

I'm not sure how they run this class at my school.
I'm working on the program now though to have a headstart on it all.

I was just wondering if there was anyone else here who was familiar with it, who might have some things to share with me.

If anyone else winds up using this, I'd be happy to keep in contact about the lessons, etc.

There does seem to be a good amount of resources on the 'net and I'll be mining for information there too.

I have used this a little bit during high school. It is very easy to use and I remember one of my friend who is really good in computer science complaining that it's not real computer science; he's at CMU now too. Basically you can create the landscape and add characters. For instance, you can command a body part of some animate figure to rotate 90 degrees in 1 second. You can give instructions to segments of the body to do a certain task but you don't have to worry too much about the syntax since you just click on a box and it drops down giving you the options. You can also type in text for an onject to say. Everything is visual as you can see the 3D object move. It's like creating a little cartoon. It pretty much captures the general ideas of programming but is much simpler.

I have the book and the program is loaded onto my computer now.
I keep trying to get myself to set aside time to work more with it before I start class next semester.

Yeah, you're right... although I don't know much about programming this does seem a bit too basic and game-like.

I feel like I understand the concepts of logic and perhaps this is what Alice is trying to teach?

Right now, I'm reading an old text book on UNIX, "A UNIX*Primer", by Ann Nicols & Nico Lomuto.
It's dated 1983, but the person I got it from says it is still a very good UNIX book for beginners.
The more I delve into computers... the more I find that I like.

Perhaps I'll go a little farther with Alice today.
What I really need to do is create a daily schedule where I set aside 'class time' for me to work with it.
I know how my ADD/HD affects my classroom focus and I just want to be as prepared for this as I can.

I'll also be taking a digital media class where the first half is Illustrator and the second is Photoshop.
I've never used Illustrator and I need to buy a copy, but I have PS/CS3 and used that in my last DM class.

Thanks for writing.

I thought I'd give it a whirl. The Linux version is a bit insane. The README.TXT tells me to double click on Alice.exe, which is a bit of a non-starter, as it hasn't given me one of those. Still, running the "run_alice" script from a shell was fairly easy. It seems to function... on alternate goes. I've no idea why it is so picky about my graphics.

Once in, I tried "Tutorial 1" of the four tutorials, listed in random order. The stupid thing made some mealy-mouthed comment about my screen, and squashed itself down to 1024x768-ish, for no particular reason.

I got to step 30, when the tutorial told me (most condescendingly) that I had made a mistake (I hadn't), and I couldn't get past that point.

The tutorial had been incredibly slow, and very unclear about what I was supposed to click on. I found it all rather tedious and badly thought out.

Back out into the main interface, and without the tutorial, most things seemed much more responsive.

Anyway, I fiddled about for a bit, delving inside the objects. Coming into bits that suddenly seemed rather "deep", but with no hint what they were talking about. E.g. a menu that offered me some sort of +1 / -1 / etc options for "b", when I had no idea what "b" might be (pun not intended).

So... marks out of ten? For prettiness, 7. For usefulness, 1. For programming, 1.

Obviously, a huge amount of effort has gone into it. I have no clear idea what it is for. As a teaching aid, it seems to maybe teach some games programming, but only in a superficial sense.

Maybe I need to use it some more. I think I'd need to turn my brain off, though, in order to cope with its tediousness. As to where "Computer Science" comes in, I'm at a loss.

HAHAHA, thanks for your comments Lau.

Yeah, for someone with your experience, I'm sure this could be rather frustrating.

I took 'computer math I & II' , in high school back in the 70's and we played around with Fortran a bit.
I was curious and like it, but just couldn't seem to stay focused on the class and never followed friends to the VoTec for the REAL computer training of the time.

So I'm sorta thinking this will be of less interest than those classes were
Still, I think it's one I have to go through for completion of a certificate program or a two year degree at this school.
We'll see how it works out.

I'll keep up on my reading at home in the meantime and hopefully get Ubuntu to work on my Dell some day.

PS. Actually, I think the site makes it fairly obvious that the Linux version is in somewhat of a "Beta" state. I'd expect the Mac version to maybe be the best (as the video seemed to be all Mac machines?).

For learning real-world programming, Python would be your best choice. So easy, yet so powerful.

Haven't touched Alice, don't want to blow bandwidth on it, so yeah, can't really say anything about it :\ Sounds a bit like a 3D version of Game Maker.