What version of Alice should you use?

A lot of people have been asking if they should jump right in and use Alice3 for the upcoming Fall Semester. My answer would be “Today’s version of Alice3 is certainly not for everyone.” As many of you know, Alice3 is in beta… and not some perfectly functional beta like Gmail. It is seriously lacking in some areas. There are no tutorials, no textbooks, the gallery is a mess, we’ve only scratched the surface on the capabilities of the Sims, there’s no undo… Holy smokes! THERE’S NO UNDO!!!

For these and many other reasons, we have added a warning dialog:

Alice3 is not for the faint of heart.

Someday, Alice3 and Looking Glass will completely replace the need for Alice2 and Storytelling Alice. As it stands, I think we have a system which shows a great deal of potential. Yet, while there are a lot of plans on how to achieve that potential… plans and potential don’t help students today.

If I had to guess, the people who are most likely to adopt Alice3 right away will be those who are drawn by the smoother transition to Java. Even in its infancy, Alice3 really has a leg up on Alice2 in this regard. For those of you who have no interest in transitioning to Java (and there are a lot of you out there), I expect that you will want to stay w/ Alice2 or Storytelling Alice for now. Further, I’d bet that even many of you who really want to leverage the transition to Java will decide to wait for Alice3 to mature. This is a perfectly fine decision. We don’t expect or even want everyone to jump ship from Alice2, right now.

The beta of Alice3 is available right now because the system cannot operate in a vacuum. The pedagogy needs to be developed and we’d rather let a few brave souls “have at it” so they can:

1. start to figure out how they want to teach with it

2. give us feedback

On that note, I would like to encourage *everyone* to try it out and let us know what you think.

For those of you in the non-transition-to-Java camp, please check out my community post on Looking Glass.