The Alice Project is an intriguing academic project at Carnegie Mellon University, which aims to teach teenage girls to program within a 3D environment. It's the brainchild of professor Randy Pausch, and offers an accessible route into learning Java and C++.
It involves a 3D virtual world populated by objects and avatars, with students dragging and dropping graphic tiles into place to animate them. The tiles correspond to standard statements in one of the programming language, and aims to provide visual feedback on exactly how these programming statements work.
It sounds like fun - if I’d had this sort of thing instead of pure BASIC when I was learning to program at school, I might’ve stuck with it longer! Interesting that the project is aimed at girls, too. There’s often talk in the games industry (and particularly mobile games) about the lack of female developers, so schemes such as this can only be positive.
Alice is freely available too, so you can download it from the official website (link above).
(via Huliq)
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