What is Alice?

Creating Movies and Games as a Motivation for learning Programming thinking

In a global environment that is increasingly dependent on computing, it is critical that our students should be familiar with programming concepts.

Introductory Computer Science courses often use examples and assignments from the business computing and systems building domains. These examples are intended as a foundation for computer science concepts in a domain that makes the problems relevant to students, yet many students do not begin to see the relevance of their computer science classes until they are ready for college.

Carnegie Mellon has created a programming environment, Alice, that allows students to learn basic computer science while creating animated movies and simple video games where students control the behaviors of 3D objects and characters in a virtual world. 

In Alice, students construct programs by dragging and dropping tiles that represent words in a programming language; Alice removes the possibility for syntax errors, a common source of frustration for beginning programmers. Students can watch their programs execute, which enables students to see where they have made mistakes. Unlike many programming environments for novices, Alice allows students to gain experience with all the programming constructs typically taught in programming courses.