Apologies for the understandable frustration.
What you are seeing today is a version of Alice that is not only under heavy construction but also has been torqued to the needs of a CS101 class. As far as “not a popular idea in this forum” nothing could be further from the truth.
I agree with you that Alice3 in its current default incantation is far too complex (even for someone in CS101, never mind middle school). We are working on it and are far from finished.
Beyond that I would like to assure you that you need not worry about convincing us that what you have described is important.
There are multiple audiences for this system and we understand that.
Beyond just the simple customization that Alice will provide (which some of you have already started to discover) what is really exciting is continuing work of
Caitlin Kelleher and her students at
WashU on LookingGlass. (For those of you who don't know, Caitlin's dissertation work was StorytellingAlice which is the basis of Alice3.) Having seen an advance look of Looking Glass, I can tell you that you will be very pleased when it comes out.
Looking Glass goes way beyond a simple repackaging of Alice3 optimized for middle schoolers. They are already making advances in code search, debugging, and supporting students learning from existing worlds.
So to sum up, we are working together to build two separate systems which will hopefully be better than creating one system that tries to meet the needs of different audiences.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ttkrakus
I am getting a little frustrated with v3.0...what about those "procedures"
There is so much Java jargon in this version that seing "procedures" gives me indigestion. We have "this" and "classes" and "mouseListeners", why do you have to talk about "procedures" where such syntactical construct does not exist in Java --or was it added recently and I did not notice?
Of course, we can also argue that the "for all together" does not have a syntactically counterpart in Java either...which reinforces my view that Alice should be language independent, but this is not a popular idea in this forum.
I am a bit concerned that Alice 3.0 is getting so complex that we are going to have to learn Alice 2.X first to ease the transition to Alice 3.0!
Anyways...
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