The Team – Alice

Current Team

Melanie Lam

Melanie Lam

Director

melanielam@cmu.edu

Melanie joins the Alice Project as a veteran producer and designer with numerous shipped titles on the Sims Franchise and Dreamworks movie games during her industry tenure. Moving into edtech, she designed a speech recognition reading app and provided engagement design consulting for Khan Academy. Melanie has been on the faculty of the Entertainment Technology Center and the Director of the National High School Game Academy, Carnegie Mellon’s Summer Precollege Program. She is passionate about education equity and access, volunteering at Streetcode Academy and Current Silicon Valley towards that end. She holds a Bachelor of Communication Studies from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore and a Master of Entertainment Technology from Carnegie Mellon University.
Daniel Abeshouse

Daniel Abeshouse

Lead Developer

Daniel joined as Lead Developer of the Alice 3 platform in July of 2017. Daniel’s previous work in industry includes designing domain specific languages, developing an intelligent tutoring system, and building collaboration software.

Daniel’s interest in education has led him to serve on the board of the Environmental Charter School here in Pittsburgh. He has also volunteered teaching Alice in his son’s middle school robotics club and has joined the TEALS program to help to teach CS to high school students.

Daniel holds a Bachelors of Science from CMU’s Computer Science department where he graduated with honors. He finds writing about himself slightly uncomfortable, and doing so in the third person doubly so.
Dave Culyba

Dave Culyba

Developer

Through his time as a CS undergraduate at Carnegie Mellon and as an ETC masters student, Dave worked with the Stage 3 research group on Alice 2. He subsequently went to Electronic Arts to work on the editors in the PC game Spore.
Steve Audia

Steve Audia

Steve Audia is the Technical Coordinator for the Entertainment Technology Center and the Alice Team. If Steve hadn’t discovered computers at the age of seven, he’d probably still be building transformers out of Lego. Pursuing his love of both technology and creative process, he decided to study architecture, and received a Bachelors of Science degree in Architectural Design from the University of Virginia in 1999. Upon graduation, Steve spent a one-year residency with Randy Pausch’s Stage3 research group as a digital artist. This landed him a job as an artist and python programmer for Walt Disney Imagineering’s DisneyQuest, where he helped design and prototype virtual and augmented reality attractions. Now back at Carnegie Mellon, Steve is also working towards being an animation teacher and developing animation tools to augment software used in the ETC curriculum. Steve still hasn’t given up his dream of one day being a Y2K engineer.

Advisory Board

Adrienne Decker

Adrienne Decker

Adrienne Decker, PhD is an Associate Professor in the School of Interactive Games and Media and member of the Laboratory for Media, Arts, Games, Interaction and Creativity (MAGIC) at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Her areas of interest encompass various aspects of media-centric computing education including instruction in introductory programming, assessment, diversity issues impacting computing disciplines, and effectiveness of computing outreach efforts. She currently serves on the AP Computer Science A development committee and was conference co-chair of SIGCSE 2015, the ACM conference on computer science education. In July 2016, she began a three year term as treasurer of ACM SIGCSE. She has authored over 20 publications, and organized and led workshops in the area of computing education.
Jesse Schell

Jesse Schell

Jesse is the CEO of Schell Games, a team of one hundred people who strive to make the world’s greatest educational and transformational games, including Yale Medical’s PlayForward: Elm City Stories, Water Bears VR, the Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood games, and Happy Atoms. Schell Games also creates pure entertainment content, such as the award-winning VR game, I Expect You To Die, and the comedy space game Orion Trail. Jesse also serves as Distinguished Professor of the Practice of Entertainment Technology at Carnegie Mellon University. Jesse has worked on a wide variety of innovative game and simulation projects for both entertainment and education, but he is best known for his award-winning book The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses and his predictions about the future of gaming technology. He is a previous chair of the International Game Developers Association, and former Creative Director of the Disney Virtual Reality Studio.
Mark Stehlik

Mark Stehlik

Mark Stehlik is a Teaching Professor in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He has been a member of the Carnegie Mellon Computer Science faculty since 1982 and has taught Computer Science classes at both the Pittsburgh and CMU-Q (Doha, Qatar) campuses. He served as Assistant Dean for Undergraduate Education in the School of Computer Science for twenty years prior to being named Associate Dean for Education at CMU-Q in 2012. He returned to the School of Computer Science as Assistant Dean for Outreach in 2015.

In addition to teaching first- and second-year Computer Science courses, in his role as Assistant Dean for Undergraduate Education, Mark administered the Carnegie Mellon Computer Science Undergraduate program since its inception in 1988 and helped graduate over 2,700 alumni. He was awarded the Carnegie Mellon Undergraduate Advising Award for Outstanding Contributions to Academic Advising and Mentoring in 1993, the School of Computer Science Herbert A. Simon Award for Teaching Excellence in 1997, and the Robert Doherty Award for Sustained Contributions to Excellence in Education in 2012.

Outside Carnegie Mellon, Mark is very involved in Computer Science education at the K-12 level. He is the co-author of the second edition of “Karel the Robot”, an acclaimed introduction to programming and problem solving. He was involved with the College Board’s Advanced Placement Computer Science program since its inception in 1984 and was the Chief Reader of the AP Computer Science examination from 1994 to 1999. He helped develop and promote the CMU graphics package, a C++ graphics API that was used by thousands of students in Advanced Placement and college Computer Science courses in the late 1990’s. He has given teacher training workshops and in-service presentations to over 1,000 secondary school teachers. One of those workshops was the first CS4Qatar Workshop for Teachers, a three-day workshop delivered to approximately 90 ICT teachers.
Joe Shochet

Joe Shochet

Joe Shochet has been developing award-winning interactive educational and entertainment experiences for 30 years. In 2014 he co-founded codeSpark, a venture backed startup whose mission is to teach all kids the ABC’s of computer science. Development of codeSpark is backed by research grants from the Department of Education Institute of Education Sciences, SBIR, and the National Science Foundation. In 2021 codeSpark was acquired by Begin Learning.

His career started in 1996 at Walt Disney Imagineering R&D building virtual reality attractions for the theme parks and designing ride concepts and interactive technologies. After transitioning to Creative Director at Disney Internet Group, Joe was a lead designer and developer of several virtual worlds including the popular Toontown Online, one of the first 3D virtual worlds for children.

Joe has a Computer Science degree from the University of Virginia. He was a member of the original Alice3D team under Randy Pausch, where research was focused on virtual reality, user interface design, and teaching programming to novices.

In Memoriam

Randy Pausch

Randy was a Professor of Computer Science, Human-Computer Interaction and Design at Carnegie Mellon, and co-founder of the Entertainment Technology Center. He also served as the Director of Carnegie Mellon’s Alice research group, where he oversaw the development of Alice.

He was a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator and a Lilly Foundation Teaching Fellow. In 1995, he spent a Sabbatical with the Walt Disney Imagineering Virtual Reality Studio and consulted with Imagineering on interactive theme park attractions, particularly for the “DisneyQuest” virtual-reality based theme park. Dr. Pausch authored or co-authored five books and over 60 reviewed journal and conference proceedings articles, and his primary interests were human-computer interaction, entertainment technology and undergraduate education.

Collaborating Faculty

Caitlin Kelleher

Caitlin Kelleher

Caitlin Kelleher is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Washington University in St. Louis. She completed her doctorate at Carnegie Mellon University working with Professor Randy Pausch and spent her undergraduate years at Virginia Tech.

Caitlin joined the Alice project in 1999 when she began as a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon. As part of her dissertation work, she created Storytelling Alice which introduces programming as a means to the end of storytelling. Storytelling Alice was extensively tested with middle school students, especially girls. One of the main findings was that presenting programming in a storytelling context made the process of learning to program measurably more motivating for middle school girls, an audience that is traditionally difficult to interest in computer programming. She continues to be deeply interested in creating novice programming environments that inspire and support users in completing self-directed projects.

Caitlin has published papers in several conferences and journals. As a graduate student, she was recipient of a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship.
Stephen Cooper

Stephen Cooper

Steve Cooper is an Associate Professor (teaching) in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University. He is currently on leave from Purdue University, where he serves as Professor of Computer Graphics Technology and as a Professor of Computer Science (courtesy). Prior to that, he was an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Saint Joseph’s University and the Director its Center for Visualization.

His research areas lie in program visualization and semantics. He has been working with Alice and developing Alice-related curricular materials since 1998. Along with Wanda Dann and the late Randy Pausch, he has written many technical papers on Alice, as well as two texts, Learning to Program with Alice (2009, Prentice-Hall) and Exploring Wonderland (2010, Prentice-Hall). The latter text, which includes Barbara Ericson as a co-author, integrates Alice and Media Computation into a single CS1 course. From 2007-2009, Steve worked in NSF’s Division of Undergraduate Education, within its Education and Human Resources Directorate. There, he worked as a program manager, and worked on the CCLI, ATE, NSDL, SFS, and S-STEM programs.

Current (funded) research projects on which he is working include the creation of a serious game to teach secure coding practices to novice programmers, incorporation of a cognitive tutoring system into Alice, and a new Google-like approach towards digital libraries to make them more usable. Another project on which he is working is towards creating a series of curricular guidelines for IA programs. Steve also serves as Vice President of the Board of Directors for the Computer Science Teachers Association.
Jacobo Carrasquel

Jacobo Carrasquel

Jacobo Carrasquel is an Associate Teaching Professor in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). Originally, from Caracas, Venezuela, Jacobo has been at CMU since 1980. He has been working with Alice since 2010. He is currently working on the Spanish version of Alice 2 (object base) and Alice 3 (object-oriented).

In the last 20 years, Jacobo has designed many CS courses as part of the CS curriculum at CMU. He has taught CS1 and CS2 courses in many languages and to different types of students. In addition, since 2006, Jacobo has been the academic advisor for the Computer Science freshman class at CMU.

Internationally, Jacobo has worked with the Instituto Tecnologico de Monterrey (ITESM) in Mexico, The International Institute of Information Technology in India, and the Fundacion Omar Dengo in Costa Rica. Jacobo was one of the original readers of the Advaced Placement Computer Science. He his a member of SIGCSE, and IEEE.
Saquib Razak

Saquib Razak

Saquib Razak is the Lead Principal Investigator for the “Alice in the Middle East” project. This research project is funded by Qatar National Research Fund (QNRF) under the National Priorities Research Program (NPRP), and aims to modify the Alice software to be internationally and culturally relevant for the Middle East. The project has resulted in several new models from Middle Eastern culture as well as a two-semester long computing curriculum that is being used in several schools in Qatar. The project also resulted in two text books for teaching computing in Middle Schools. One of the books was written in Arabic to support local schools that use Arabic as medium of instructions.

Saquib Razak is an Associate Teaching Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar. He completed his Ph.D. in Computer Science from State University of New York, Binghamton in 2009. He has a BS and an MS degree in Electrical Engineering from University of Texas, Austin. Saquib worked as an Embedded Software Engineer at Motorola Inc. for eight years before moving to academia. His research interests include Embedded Systems, Internet of Things, wireless networks, and computer science education.

Previous Alice Team Members

Eric Brown

Eric Brown

Eric Brown served as Director of the Alice Project from March 2016 to December 2021. Eric first came in contact with the Alice project while having the honor of having Randy Pausch as a Professor while a graduate student at the Entertainment Technology Center receiving his MET in 2006.

Eric’s previous work includes co-founding ImpactGames to influence society and promote change through interactive media. Toward this end, ImpactGames developed PeaceMaker, a video game simulation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to promote dialogue and understanding. Unlike most serious games, PeaceMaker bridges the gap between education and entertainment and reached a mass market audience. Other work includes founding The Additive Project bringing 3D printing and product design programming to after school and local youth outreach groups and consulting with a number of large companies and small start-ups on product design and development and game based educational products. Eric was listed among “100 Social Entrepreneurs Changing the World” in Newsweek Japan. He holds a Masters of Entertainment Technology from Carnegie Mellon University and received a BFA in Painting with focused studies in education and computer graphics from Washington University in St. Louis.
Wanda Dann

Wanda Dann

Director Emeritus

Dr. Wanda Dann assumed leadership of the Alice Project in 2008, after ten years of collaboration with Dr. Randy Pausch, Dennis Cosgrove, and the Stage 3 research team. This collaboration resulted in the release of Alice 2 and the publication of a textbook. The textbook, Learning to Program with Alice, was co-authored with Dr. Stephen Cooper and Dr. Randy Pausch and is now in its 3rd edition. During Wanda’s tenure as Director, Alice 3 has been developed and released.

Wanda’s research interests include visualization in programming and programming languages and innovative approaches to introductory programming. She has published numerous papers on the use of program visualization inintroductory programming. Papers have appeared in ACM’s Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE) inroads, the Computer Science Education Journal, and other related publications. Dr. Dann’s leadership as a computer science educator has been recognized in her various roles as SIGCSE Technical Symposium publications editor, special projects chair, program chair, symposium chair, and the SIGCSE Board.
Dennis Cosgrove

Dennis Cosgrove

Research Scientist Emeritus

Dennis Cosgrove has worked on the Alice system since its beginnings back in the early 1990s when it was a rapid prototyping tool for constructing head mounted display based virtual environments. He played a key role in designing and implementing versions of Alice which have striven to lower the barriers of entry to 3D graphics and, more recently, to support a gentler introduction to programming.

Dennis has been the Chief Architect of Alice 3 since its inception in February, 2006. Dennis has co-authored academic papers presented at the ACM I3D, UIST, and SIGCHI conferences. Dennis was selected as the first Computer Science Department “Undergraduate Education Award” winner at the University of Virginia in 1992. He was also selected as a Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science “Outstanding Member of the Community Award,” as well as an University wide “Andy Award” in 2001.
Don Slater

Don Slater

Don Slater taught for 21 years in K-12 before moving to Carnegie Mellon University’s Computer Science Department as an Assistant Teaching Professor in 2000. Don joined the Alice Team in the fall of 2005 as an instructional designer. In the fall of 2012, he left the classroom to become a full time member of the Alice Project.

Don has presented at teacher training workshops in the U.S., and presented papers at NECC, SIGCSE, IMICT, and ISECON. He has also presented at workshops in Brazil, Costa Rica, and Columbia. Don has been a consultant for the College Board in Advanced Placement Computer Science since 1991. He has written articles for the College Board and led teacher workshops, including the AP Teacher Workshop held summers 2001 – 2009 at Carnegie Mellon.

Don is a native of Western Pennsylvania. Unlike many who grew up in the 70’s with the obligatory guitar accessory, Don did not give it up at the beginning of the disco craze, but continues to enjoy playing his guitar whenever he has the opportunity.
Laura Paoletti

Laura Paoletti

Laura has been a member of the Alice Project since Fall, 2011. She graduated from Carnegie Mellon with a degrees in both Computer Science and Fine Arts.

She is the lead model builder for the Alice 3 Project.
Gabe Yu

Gabe Yu

Gabe Yu was the Lab Manager for the Alice Team for 10+ years. He has a BA in English and a minor in Media Studies from Carnegie Mellon University. He loves music, movies, plays and cooking. Appropriately, he decided on a career in computer science.

Gabe is now a producer at Schell Games.

When people ask him what he did with the Alice Project, his typical reply was, “A little of everything!” Gabe now troubleshoots our servers for us, calling on his knowledge and understanding of our goals. His dream is to be a 7-foot basketball player for the Los Angeles Lakers.
Peihong Tan

Peihong Tan

Pei graduated with a BFA in Industrial Design from Rochester Institute of Technology, and a Masters of Entertainment Technology from Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center.

He joined the Alice Project in the Summer of 2012.
Stage 3 Research Group

Stage 3 Research Group

Stage3, a former Carnegie Mellon University HCII research group, is responsible for much of the research and development into Alice, both when it was a VR-based system and its transformation into an introductory programming teaching tool.