Alice: A Fresh Approach to

Teaching Computer Science

www.alice.org
Carnegie Mellon University
Project Director, Randy Pausch (pausch@cmu.edu)
Creating Movies and Games as a Alice: Visible Data, and No Syntax! Schools
Motivation for Programming Using Alice
In Alice, students construct programs by dragging and
Computer Science enrollments dropped 23% last dropping tiles that represent words in a programming Bucknell University
year. In a country that is increasingly dependent on language; Alice removes the possibility for syntax errors, a California Lutheran
computing, it is critical that we reverse this trend. University
common source of frustration for beginning programmers.
Introductory Computer Science courses often draw California State
Students can watch their programs execute, which enables
University at
examples and assignments from the business students to see where they have made mistakes. Unlike many Humboldt
computing and systems building domains. These programming environments for novices, Alice allows Camden County
contexts are intended to ground computer science students to gain experience with all the programming College
concepts in a domain that makes the problems constructs typically taught in programming courses. Carnegie Mellon
relevant to students, yet many students do not begin to University
see the relevance of their computer science classes Clemson University
until their sophomore and junior years. Rather than A Quick Tour of Alice Colorado School of
relying on business and systems building examples, Mines
we have created a programming environment that Community College of
Philadelphia
allows students to learn basic computer science
Cornell University
while creating animated movies and simple video
games where students control the behaviors of 3D 2 3 Duke University

objects and characters in a virtual world. Alice is 1 Georgetown College

Haverford College
freely available and open source.
Ithaca College
Manor College
5 Mississippi Valley
State University
Alice has been Formally Shown to
Plymouth State
Improve Grades and Retention University
4 Saint Edward’s
Alice has been formally shown to help at-risk University
students (those with a weak math background and/or Saint Joseph’s
no prior programming experience) succeed in University
Computer Science*. At-risk students who take an Saint Lawrence
The object tree displays a list of objects in the College
Alice class either prior to or concurrent with CS1
perform as well as students who are not at-risk, and 1 current Alice world and allows students to select San Diego State
University
substantially better than other at-risk students. objects.
Sierra Nevada College
Prentice-Hall has published a textbook based on
Alice for college-level introductory programming. 2 The scene editor allows students to lay out objects Southwestern
University
in their 3D worlds
Tompkins Cortland
Alice Improves Student Performance in CS1: 3 Students use events to associate methods with
mouse clicks, object collision, etc.
Community College
University of Colorado
Performance of at- Grade Take University of Illinois
The details area displays methods, functions, and
risk students: in CS1 CS2? 4 data for the selected object.
University of
Mississippi
Without Alice C 47% Virginia Polytechnic
Students can build programs by dragging methods
With Alice B 88% 5 from the details area.
Institute
And many high schools
* Moskal,M., D. Lurie, and S. Cooper, Evaluating t he Effectiveness of a New Instructional Approach. In Proceedings of 2004 SIGCSE Conference, (Norfolk, VA), 75-79.

The Alice gallery contains more than 700 characters and objects.

Alice: a revolutionary way to A free gift to you from

teach programming