Alice in Windowsland

Is there any software that can introduce my children to programming and make it fun in the process?

A friend of mine sent me a link to Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture. I had heard about and have been meaning to watch it. Randy recently passed away from pancreatic cancer. Another friend of mine, Rob Butcher, was recently diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and it’s in his liver too. Please pray for him.

So, I watched the video with my family.

What a wonderful person Randy Pausch was. The world has a small whole in it from his passing I’m sure. After watching the video, I did some more reading about him and found his website at Carnegie Mellon University. From there I found a link to the Alice website.

Alice is a program that teaches software development principals to middle and high school students. In the software, you manipulate 3D objects by giving them programming instructions. It is event driven so you can tie functions to mouse and keyboard events. It is a very rich application and kind of fun to play way.

My daughter, Aleshia, took to it like a duck on water. She loves it. I’ve been trying to get her to play with programming a little and now I finally found something that she can learn in.

Give Alice a try even if you’re an adult. Oh, it’s free . . .