Storytelling Alice

I just read through the SIGCSE 2007 Tea Party presentation and am curious about Storytelling Alice. I've been using Alice in my class for about 6 months and would like to know (1) is Storytelling Alice a different version of the software or a different approach to using the software? and (2) Where can I get some ideas for using Storytelling Alice?

Found this on terranova from March this year

Storytelling in Wonderland

Nate Combs

In Ruby Slippers we discussed (in comments) the dreadful state that computer science education finds itself in the west US. Kami mentioned CMU's Alice in comment back then and Grady Booch reminds us anew recently:

"(Alice is) a modern programming environment designed to be a student's first exposure to object-oriented programming. It allows students to learn basic computer science while creating animated movies, simple video games, where students control the behavior of 3D objects and characters in a virtual world."

From SIGCSE feedback it may be that Alice is back (if it ever went away) with a Wonderland vengence. Will virtual worlds be the driver that revives computer science?

Take a look at the 2007 SIGCSE presentation (8mb PPT). Note the instructional material at aliceprogramming. From the SIGCSE slides, the 3.0 version is slated for release in 2008. Mentioned is Caitlin Kelleher's work with Storytelling Alice (dissertation, 15mb PDF): Using Storytelling to Make Computer Programming Attractive to Middle School Girls.

Worth the visit! (http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nov...elling_al.html)

Same author and his dissertation, so it seems a technique of using alice in educational context, not a special software.

You can download Storytelling Alice and also some brief documentation for it from this site:
http://www.alice.org/kelleher/storytelling/

Good luck

Thanks for the link, I was mislead definitly.
Oops for that.

You were not mislead - the link was just recently published

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bconover@sju.edu

lance

I use Storrytelling Alice one of the cool things you can do is create new scenes and most old Alice characters come with new pre-made moves
as well as some new objects in Storytelling Alice

Originally Posted by PopnTheDeerInHumanForm

I use Storrytelling Alice one of the cool things you can do is create new scenes and most old Alice characters come with new pre-made moves
as well as some new objects in Storytelling Alice

lol you've said that a lot lol

About half the time, when I try to load StorytellingAlice under WinXP, it freezes with the splash image on the screen. This happens regardless of whether I use the regular Alice.exe or the slow and steady version with StorytellingAlice. I don't have this problem with Alice 2.0, or with any other program that I can think of.

When it freezes, I have to go to the task manager, end the task, cross my fingers, and try to start the program again. Sometimes it starts and sometimes it doesn't.

I don't think that this is the result of the infamous imgicon process, which is a problem with different symptoms in V2.0. In V2.0, that problem can be avoided by ending that the imgicon process, so I make certain that it is not running any time that I try to run either version of Alice.

Is anyone else having this problem?

Dick Baldwin

I'll try out STA; see if I like it.

Originally Posted by DickBaldwin

Is anyone else having this problem?

Not half the time, but it does happen occasionally. Taking a guess, it's a problem with trying to update the "recent worlds" screen or something else in the .alice file - but that's pure speculation.

Re the multiple scene question in another thread. A nice way to do that is with method calls:

When the world starts
Do in order
Scene 1
Scene 2
etc.

You still have to have different backgrounds at different places, etc., but this is a good way to sequence between scenes at a top level - probably wouldn't go as far as to call it an "event handler" because it's strictly sequential.