Courses > Database Management & Programming > Introduction to Alice 2.0 Programming

Alice was designed to teach object-oriented principles to novice programmers, all while helping them to create exciting, three-dimensional worlds for animations and games.

This course will show you how to create programs that use basic programming concepts like variables, decisions, events, loops, and arrays. The best part is that you'll be able to learn and practice these techniques while creating programs in a three-dimensional world. This makes programming more fun and easier to learn.

By the end of the course, you'll be able to make interesting three-dimensional worlds that your audience can view like movies or play like interactive video games. You'll also be able to take the concepts you've learned here and apply them to other object-oriented languages like Java, C++, C#, or Visual Basic.

This course includes a knowledgeable and caring instructor who will guide you through your lessons, facilitate discussions, and answer your questions. The instructor for this course will be Mike Orsega.

Mike Orsega has a diverse background, with a Bachelor's Degree in Physics from Pennsylvania State University and a Master's Degree in Applied Math from the University of Georgia. Upon graduation, Orsega turned to teaching and discovered the exciting potential of online education. He has more than five years of online teaching experience in university and college coursework ranging from basic computer literacy to advanced programming languages, including online courses in Alice and C# programming.

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Requirements:

Alice v2.0 is a free download at www.alice.org. There are Alice 2.0 versions for Microsoft Windows (ME, NT, 2000, XP, and Vista). Additionally, there are Alice 2.0 releases for Mac OSX and Linux. You will also need Internet access, e-mail, the Microsoft Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox Web browser, and the Adobe Flash and PDF plug-ins (two free and simple downloads you obtain at http://www.adobe.com/downloads by clicking Get Adobe Flash Player and Get Adobe Reader).

Syllabus:

All courses run for six weeks, with a two-week grace period at the end. Two lessons are released each week for the six-week duration of the course. You do not have to be present when the lesson is released, but you must complete each lesson within two weeks of its release.

A new section of each course starts on the second or third Wednesday of each month. If enrolling in a series of two or more courses, please be sure to space the start date for each course at least two months apart.

Week One

Wednesday - Lesson 01

What would you say if I told you that after only a single lesson in Alice, you'll be able to write an animated, three-dimensional movie? Well, that's exactly what you'll do in this first lesson. You'll start off by learning how to get Alice onto your computer, and then we'll take a tour through the different areas of the Alice interface. You'll finish by writing the classic "Hello World!" program, only this time as an animated three-dimensional Alice world!

Friday - Lesson 02

Now that you've gotten to know Alice, I'll show you how to design and develop your three-dimensional world. We'll talk about moving, turning, and rotating objects in three-dimensional space. You'll also learn a little bit about the Alice object's built-in methods that allow the objects to move, turn, rotate, and many other things while the world plays.

Week Two

Wednesday - Lesson 03

It's now time to let your imagination run wild with Alice. In this lesson, you'll get a chance to write some instructions for your objects to help them move and interact with one another. Specifically, I'll show you how to get a couple of Eskimos to go for a walk around their igloo. Does this sound challenging? Well, after you work through this lesson, you'll see just how easy Alice makes it.

Friday - Lesson 04

So far, all of our worlds have executed our program statements, one after another. That's fine, but to make things more interesting, there are times when you'll prefer for one set of statements to run under one condition, while another set runs under a different condition. In programming terms, this is the decision structure, and that's what Lesson 4 is all about. We'll also talk about how to get user input, which will help you make your worlds interactive and create a more personal experience for your users.

Week Three

Wednesday - Lesson 05

Programming structures like the If statement are great. But Alice is all about having fun. In this lesson, we'll take a break from structures and work on precisely placing three-dimensional objects. We'll also look at some interesting object properties that can make your programming life so much easier. Finally, we'll explore how to make certain parts of the objects move to add a little more realism to your worlds.

Friday - Lesson 06

Now we'll turn back to programming structures and talk about the repetition structure. This is a powerful tool because now, instead of writing the same instructions over and over, we can just place a looping structure in our code to get the same results. We'll also explore one of the really fun parts of programming—the generation of random numbers. You can use this to make your objects move at random, or you could even create three-dimensional games of chance.

Week Four

Wednesday - Lesson 07

In this lesson, we'll do a little space exploration while learning about keyboard events. We'll start with the space template and some out-of-this-world objects, and then use the keyboard events to maneuver a spacecraft around the lunar surface while trying to discover some alien life forms. You'll also learn a little about user-defined methods and write one of your own. This will help you to organize the code in your program and make it easier to write at the same time!

Friday - Lesson 08

Now that you've learned how to write your own methods, it's time to learn about writing your own functions. What's the difference? Well, our functions will return some value. That means that in this lesson, you'll not only learn how to write code to perform numeric calculations, but you'll also learn how to write code to answer some questions about your objects. Again, this is going to help to make your world code better organized and easier to read.

Week Five

Wednesday - Lesson 09

At this point, we've gone into a lot of programming structure, so we'll take a break in Lesson 9 and put these concepts into action with a flight simulator. It may be a little daunting to think about writing a whole three-dimensional flight simulator in a single lesson, but it's true. And with Alice, it isn't too hard. After all, what is a flight simulator? We'll just need a loop to move the plane forward while giving the user the ability to turn the plane in a different direction. Add in a three-dimensional hedge maze, and we're ready to do some flying!

Friday - Lesson 10

Alice will give you access to a lot of different three-dimensional objects, but what about images that you've made? While creating three-dimensional objects is way beyond the scope of this course, it's really easy to add two-dimensional images, or even to use these images as the texture of your objects. In this lesson, you'll not only learn how to work with two-dimensional image files, but also how to import and use sound files. Here's your chance to add a soundtrack to your three-dimensional world!

Week Six

Wednesday - Lesson 11

So far, we've only worked with single objects. This is interesting enough, but what if you want a group of objects to work together? What if you want the Rockettes to do a little dance? Or maybe you want to create a synchronized swimming routine? This could mean a lot of coding if you're using single objects. But fortunately, Alice allows you to use the List structure to help animate groups of objects with far less trouble. By the end of this lesson, you'll be able to give your users a nicely synchronized dance routine with only a minimal amount of effort.

Friday - Lesson 12

You've learned an awful lot about animation in this course. But really, Alice was created to teach you programming. So I want to use our last lesson together to show you how easy it is to animate a common sorting programming subroutine—the Bubble Sort. Students often have difficulty visualizing this sorting algorithm. But visualization is Alice's specialty. So in our final lesson, you'll learn a little bit about array structures and use your knowledge of methods to animate the Bubble Sort so that you can watch the algorithm as it takes place. This will be especially helpful if you decide to move on to programming in a language like Visual Basic, Java, or C#.

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