LEARN TO PROGRAM WITH ALICE

1
LEARN TO PROGRAM WITH ALICE

• Xiannong Meng
• Computer Science Department
• Bucknell University

2
Lecture One

• Introduction

3
Introduction to the Seminar

• Introduce our TA, Alexis Lang (aalang_at_bucknell.edu
  )
• Go through the syllabus and schedule
• The Alice software is available at www.alice.org
  for free download and use
• Bug reporting http//www.alice.org/bugreport/subm
  it.php
• Distribute textbooks
• Two examples from previous ENGR 100 student
  projects

4
A Few Words about the Project

• Work in team of three to produce a short
  animation between 30 seconds and two minutes
• Choose settings and scenes of your own
• The project should be G rated, ready to show to
  elementary students. No violent or sexual
  contents.
• The teams are assigned. If this happens to be the
  same team as you had in ADA, let me know now and
  Ill change it.
• Start to think about the project now, due by
  Thursday, November 17th 100 pm.

5
The Alice Environment(Appendix A)

• Start Alice by
• startprogramsprogramsA-HAliceAlice.exe
• Five areas in the IDE (integrated development
  environment)
• Object tree
• Detailed pane (properties, methods, questions)
• World view
• Events editor
• Method editor

6
The Alice Environment(Appendix A)

• Create scenes using gallery (local or web)
• Use local gallery as much as possible, as it
  takes longer time to access the web gallery
• Two ways to locate an object in the gallery
• Browsing the tree structure of objects
• Searching the object by key words

7
Two Examples

• FirstWorld.a2w
• Load the program
• (\\facultystaff\x\xmeng\public\engr100\alice-book-
  cd\content\GettingStarted)
• Play the animation
• Non-interactive animation (movie style)
• DacningBee.a2w
• Event-driven animation (interactive style)
• up-arrow key for Hare to jump, space bar for Bee
  to perform a pirouette in flight

8
Basic Concepts in Alice

• Virtual world an animation is implemented in
  Alice as a virtual world
• Object basic entity in Alice that has features.
• Dimensions and directions each object in Alice
  has
• Dimensions height, width, depth
• Directions up, down, forward, back, left, right
• Center of an object at the center of mass
• Objects can be retrieved from
• Local gallery, or
• Web gallery

9
Basic Concepts in Alice (cont)

• Distance distance between two objects is
  measured from the centers
• Location in a 3-D space, described by a triplet
  (x,y,z). The center of the ground is at (0,0,0)
• Animation you develop a set of commands
  (methods) for each of the object in your world to
  interact with each other, creating an effect of
  animation

10
Exercise for the Day

• Finish the Getting Started tutorial in Appendix
  A, turn in the result of Part 2 Using Popup
  Menus to Create an Initial Scene (page 317)
• Exercise 3 of chapter 1 (page 18), no need to use
  methods, yet.
• Turn in the world in electronic form to the TA
  before the beginning of Wednesdays lecture.
• File name e.g. ex1-1-xmeng.a2w, ex1-2-xmeng.a2w