Copy Method?

I've just spent ages perfecting a walk and it is currently a method under 'world' called 'AliceWalk' I want to use the method 'AliceWalk' on a different file and i don't wan't to redo everything (in the other file). Is there someway i can export the method and then import it or is there a better way?

You can try this . . .

Open the world with your AliceWalk method. Highlight and copy the method to the Alice clipboard. Now open your new world and past the AliceWalk method into this world from your clipboard.

When you copy something to Alice's clipboard it pretty much stays on the clip board until you either overwrite it by pasting something new to it or you shut Alice down.


Good luck

Let me echo Lance's closing:

GOOD LUCK

My experience with the clipboard has been pretty grim. Very frequently when I try to use it to copy code, I end up with a Mean Queen error message for no apparent reason.

Dick Baldwin

Things not to do:

1. Don't close Alice itself, just close the one world and open another.
2. Don't try to do a "drag and drop" unless all of the objects referenced in the clipboard being dropped exist or are accessable at the destination location.
3. Don't use different sub-object hierarchies for different but similar objects and try use a method from one in the other.

Good Luck! (Do I hear an echo somewhere? )

Good luck
Good luck
Good luck
Good luck
Good luck
Good luck
Good luck
...

Folks, least we forget......ALICE is a rudimentary (repeat: Early Learning) teaching tool. Let's not try and make it something that it's NOT !

I had 9th graders working with ALICE last year and before the year was over they where ready to move on to Karel J Robot for some "hard-core" programming. To me, that is what ALICE was designed to do.

You can have your pretty picture contests, but when a 9th grader tells me that she understands how the Towers-Of-Hanoi program works in Alice and now she wants to put recursion to practical use I have to say: "ALICE has done it's job !"

I'm sure you have seen gabe's response to my msg in the Alice 3.0 Discussion thread. ALICE 3.0 will allow you to type code to your heart's content - I have a feeling we will loose the cookie-monster when 3.0 is released.

Sorry for ranting,

Lance,

I don't disagree with what you are saying, and I don't expect the folks at Carnegie Mellon to expend the effort to add advanced features such as polymorphism to Alice 2.0.

However, it would be nice if they would fix, or at least document, some of the more obvious bugs, such as the unreliability of the clipboard and copy features, and the inability of arrays to perform the most rudimentary array processing tasks using variables of type Number. (See http://www.alice.org/community/showthread.php?t=810)

I consider Alice to be a good teaching tool, but I would prefer not to have to explain to a student that she has just wasted a large amount of time and efforting trying to debug her code for an array-oriented program when the problem was not with her code at all, but rather was the result of a major, but apparently undocumented bug in Alice 2.0. (Again, see http://www.alice.org/community/showthread.php?t=810)

While they are at it, it would be nice if they would either fix or remove the "Report a bug" link on their main Alice 2.0 page and get rid of that silly message that reads " We are currently in the process of upgrading our bug reporting system. Please check back later. Thank you." I have been "checking back later" for months to no avail and have come to the conclusion that there is currently no effort underway to "upgrade" the bug reporting system. There simply is no operational bug reporting system.

Lack of advanced features - I understand.

Major fundamental undocumented bugs and a broken bug-reporting system - I don't understand. Those conditions simply serve to give Alice 2.0 a bad name and serve as ammunition for those in the teaching industry who continue to insist that programming fundamentals courses must be taught using C, C++, Java, C#, etc.

Dick Baldwin

Point noted. . . . . And I will update to Window's Vista once Service Pack 43 is released.

On a more serious note - why update a "dead" project? As I understand it all efforts are being placed into the newer version, 3.0.

And on an even more serious note my grandfather was famous for saying: "YOU GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR - LIVE WITH IT - WORK WITH IT - AND MAKE IT WORK!" I did not pay for ALICE, did you or your students? Is anyone stepping forward to compensate these people to update ALICE 2.0 ?

I was referring to the fact that many people have spent many hours to provide an excellent teaching tool - it is NOT without problems, but as a teacher I know how to work around it's shortcomings. You have shown, through your internet tutorials how to overcome the shortcomings. - By the way, with your permission, I would like to use certain segments of your tutorials with my students next year.

I think the release of 3.0 will satisfy many of your concerns. However, I have heard it will be released in early 2008, not in time for this coming years study.

Regards,

Originally Posted by lanceA

Point noted. . . . . And I will update to Window's Vista once Service Pack 43 is released.

For my money, that will probably be too early to update to Windows Vista. Fortunately, MS is still fixing bugs in WinXP even though Vista has been released.

Originally Posted by lanceA

On a more serious note - why update a "dead" project? As I understand it all efforts are being placed into the newer version, 3.0.

If it were dead, neither you nor I would be using it, with a good deal of success, I might add. It is very unusual for a software product to be abandoned by its creators before the next version is released, unless it is really dead. I doubt that Randy would agree that V2.0 is dead.

Originally Posted by lanceA

And on an even more serious note my grandfather was famous for saying: "YOU GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR - LIVE WITH IT - WORK WITH IT - AND MAKE IT WORK!" I did not pay for ALICE, did you or your students? Is anyone stepping forward to compensate these people to update ALICE 2.0 ?

I also didn't pay for Sun's Java, and they do an outstanding job of supporting it, even though they are constantly working on new versions.

I may be wrong, but I strongly suspect that Randy and all of the professionals on his team are compensated for their efforts in the same way that you and I are compensated for our efforts. Apparently the funds to do that come from the NSF and other governmental or quasi-governmental agencies. I even suspect that the grad students who work on the project may receive some compensation.

Originally Posted by lanceA

I was referring to the fact that many people have spent many hours to provide an excellent teaching tool - it is NOT without problems, but as a teacher I know how to work around it's shortcomings.

I agree that it is an excellent teaching tool, but it is very difficult to teach beginning programmers how to use arrays for simple numeric data when the array feature of the programming language doesn't work. One of the things that we are expected to teach our students is to understand the program development cycle. In some respects, we have no choice but to tell our students that in the case of the bug reporting system and the response to the reporting of bugs (for whjch there is no operational formal mechanism), the folks at Carnegie don't practice what we preach with regard to the program development cycle.

Originally Posted by lanceA

You have shown, through your internet tutorials how to overcome the shortcomings. - By the way, with your permission, I would like to use certain segments of your tutorials with my students next year.

Knowing that most teachers who teach high school don't receive anywhere near the compensation that they deserve, I applaud what you are doing. I just wish that you were teaching in one of our feeder schools. You certainly have my permission to reproduce and use my online Alice tutorials in your classes in whatever manner you find to be effective.

Originally Posted by lanceA

I think the release of 3.0 will satisfy many of your concerns. However, I have heard it will be released in early 2008, not in time for this coming years study.

V3.0 sounds great, particularly since Java is my favorite programming language. I hope that it is released early enough in 2008 that I can use it for the summer session next year. If history is any indication of the future, I probably won't be teaching Programming Fundamentals again until then. I don't normally teach the course in the fall and spring, concentrating on three different Java/OOP courses, advanced C++, XML, and wireless networking instead.

Keep up the good work.
Dick Baldwin

P.S. I too don't have any interest in pretty picture contests and things of that sort. My sole interest in Alice has to do with my belief that I can use it to more effectively teach programming to beginning programming students than we have been doing for the past five or six years while being required to teach the course using C++.

Great responses, Dick, thanks.

You're probably already aware of it but, Joel Adams has his book out Alice in Action with Java ISBN 978-1423-900-962. The thing that sets his book apart from the other Alice books is the Interleaved Approach he uses in teaching students. For each programming concept (boolean logic, methods, etc.) he uses Alice to introduce it and then immediately revists the same concept in Java.

I like this approach because it allows the student to visually see results of programming statements and allowing them to feel comfortable with the concept and then immediately apply it in Java.

Anyway, thanks for the tutorials; I know you put a great deal of time and effort into preparing them. They will be very helpful next year.

Good luck with your classes and the last word I received was to look for 3.0 sometime in the first quarter of 2008.
Lance

PS - Just for info . . I've been on this forum for quiet some time now and I have yet to see a version change in Alice - normally you would expect to see updates numbered Alice 2.01, 2.02, etc. This lead me to make the comment about why I feel all effort has been redirected to Alice 3.0.