The Alice team is back from our trip to JavaOne in San Francisco.
Our friends at Sun set us up w/ a station in the Change (Y)our World Playground where we demoed what I tried to describe as “a sneak peak at the future of Alice”. I’m not sure how accurate the desciption of “sneak peak” was since we were handing out USB drives with the latest bits and it’s up on the web… but hopefully people will forgive me for trying to manage expectations at least a little.
We got a lot of traffic in the playground and seemed to generate genuine interest. The most exciting thing was just how many people came up to tell us how much their children or grandchildren love Alice2 and Storytelling Alice. The Sun folks had all of these Alice t-shirts made up for us to give out and we whisked through all of the smalls in no time. When we ran out of those, parents accepted mediums for their young Alice users at home. Imagine going to a computer science conference and having tons of left over larges and extra larges and no smalls or mediums!
In other news from JavaOne, the Dean of the School of Computer Science, Randy Bryant got to go on stage during the keynote to accept the Duke’s Choice Award for Alice3. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that it was the first time Dr. Bryant has ever followed up the launching of t-shirts into a crowd at a conference.
We also held a Birds of a Feather which generated some good discussion and gave my personal favorite: a lightning talk. Is there any better speaking format? With a limit of 5-7 minutes you are basically given license to talk as fast as you want. All you have to do is demo Alice for 90% of your allotted time and you’re guaranteed to have a happy audience. Hmm… I guess there is one better format. Perhaps I can make a “History of Alice” post soon about the Web 3D Round Up.
Our lightning talk was followed up by Ian Utting from the Greenfoot team which makes for a nice pairing, I think. As a bonus, we were right next to the Greenfoot booth in the playground so we got a chance to chat with Ian and Poul Henriksen and Davin McCall throughout the week. We agreed to discuss some sort of closer integration of our two tools someday when things calm down. While I’m sure things will never actually calm down, I do expect this to bubble to the top someday.
9 Comments
I’ll take one of those left-over Large Alice t-shirts.
I have loaded down Alice3 beta but I can not find how to start the application.
I can not find any icons after the installation program finished. I have really enjoyed teaching with Alice 2.2 and Storyboard Alice. I have been looking forward to seeing Alice3. I couldn’t make it to Java one but I’ll take a T-Shirt if you still have any large left over.
Thanks,
Where to download Alice 3 beta?
where to find alice3beta on the web:
http://kenai.com/projects/alice/downloads
most likely place to find alice after installation:
windows:
c:\Program Files\Alice3Beta
osx:
/Applications/Alice3Beta
this is incredible. Computers have come a long way since I started i had my first basic class in 1976. I read about this in randy paush’s book the last lecture and had to have a look at it. You have done programming a world of good. outstanding job!
So, did you see Lombard St in San Fran or take the Attica tour boat? It is Attica in the San Fransisco Bay, isn’t it? It’s pretty there. Did Alice enjoy it?
I have heard about Alice3 and would love to learn on how to do about using the program Alice3 in order to create a visual representation for kids when doing lectures. I read about this program over the net and would start reading about today. Thanks for creating such programs!
I have used Alice3 and would like to commend you guys in coming up with a program that would benefit everybody. this tool, Alice3 is such a great convenience when making calculations and coming up with graphics so my presentations would not be boring. Any updates for this program?
Great tool!
Presentations wouldn’t be boring no more.