0060 is up. For the first time in Alice 3’s brief history (brief on an astronomical time scale, anyway) one should be able to teach a semester long without the absolute necessity of being able to update the system mid-semester. We will still be fixing bug reports and making updates, of course. However, the hope is that one could theoretically make it all the way through a semester with what we have available today.
What I am personally excited about is that we can now afford to branch the code at semester boundaries and make big leaps again. As you might imagine, having the well-being of so many students tied to your updates is more than a bit daunting. It tends to keep one from making ambitious changes mid-semester.
One Comment
I have been teaching a course on Alice to junior-high students for 1.5 years. I was wondering, as we don’t have 3.0 yet, if it has the included option of grouping objects, or of copying them during the main method. You see, I’m interested in integrating Alice with the science, art, language arts, and Global Studies classes, and my ideas require this sort of thing. If it’s possible on 2.0 or 2.7, how may I access them? Do you have any ideas for how Alice might be used in conventional grade-school curriculums?