“Now I want all of you to get up and move around in a mature manner,” teacher Roger Smith said to his 6th period ALICE class. Students have been working hard on their projects and now it was time to grade each others. David Arsenyan titled his “The Mummy Returns… Again,” “A mad scientist is showing his fellow scientists about his ‘creation,’ which is a mummy. It turns out to be a success and the scientists are befuddled,” Arsenyan said. ALICE had an interesting journey with making its way to Clark. During the summer, Smith visited Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he discovered the program ALICE. Randy Pausch, the engineers, and the robotics team at Carnegie had designed the program on their own and named it after Alice in Wonderland. Junior Serli Babakhanlou described the program as “another form of animation.” ALICE is very easy to operate and consists of three basic steps: first, you pick a background in which the setting of the story will take place; second, choose the characters and/or objects you need; and finally give the objects movement and captions. All you need to do it is click and drag. The makers of ALICE were not planning on making extremely professional animations with the program; their goal was to make something simple for teachers and students to present their ideas in a visual way. Counselor Karen Carlson thought that teaching the class at Clark would “open up doors in the future for students interested in programming and Java.” “The projects are very time consuming, but easy to create. The only thing hard about the class is the tests and learning the shortcuts,” said Babakhanlou.
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ALICE proves to be a fun and easy class
December 18, 2008