Introduction to Alice

1
Introduction to Alice

• CS 110 - Honors

Slides courtesy of Wanda Dann, Ithaca College
2
Overview

• Why Alice?
• Getting Started with Alice Programming
• Using the Alice interface
• Running an Animation Program
• Main Goal
• to have you set up and run Alice so you can work
  with examples and lab exercises

3
Why Alice?

• A modern programming tool
• 3-D graphics
• 3-D models of objects
• Animation
• 3-D models can be made to move around the virtual
  world
• Free
• www.alice.org

4
The Power of Alice

• Automatically keeps track of 3-D objects
• what objects are in the virtual world
• types of object
• where they are currently located
• Automatically manages memory
• dynamically allocates memory
• reclaims memory when a world is closed or an
  object is destroyed

5
Built-ins

• To animate the 3-D objects, Alice has many
  standard operations
• Examples
• move
• turn
• roll
• resize
• setcolor

6
Libraries

• You can import program code from available
  resources
• Libraries provide additional operations for
  working with
• numbers (math computations)
• strings (characters, text)

7
Quick to Learn and Use

• Can learn to use
• interface in a couple of lab sessions
• Can learn to create
• a simple animation in a matter of minutes
• a non-trivial animation in a few lab sessions

8
Demo

• How to use the Alice interface
• interactive command line
• menu selections
• smart editor
• How to run an Alice program for animating a 3-D
  object