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How to improve Randy Pausch’s Alice
By John | April 11, 2008
If you have not heard the story of the dying professor you should pause right now and check this out … Now that you are back, here are some of my thoughts on how to improve “Alice“. I noticed a posting in the CSDiary yesterday about the “Status of the Alice Project” by Peter Lee. The big discussion on Alice is the new release Alice 3.0. This new release is going to be very exciting for anyone who has played with this tool. First off it is going to combine Story Telling Alice (STA) 2.0 with Alice 2.0. This is a big deal for younger kids because they tend to adapt better to Story Telling Alice than Alice (in short there are more story-telling like methods included w/STA than w/Alice). Also, Electronic Arts (yea that’s right the Tiger Woods PGA and Madden NFL guys), are going to donate the SIMS 2 objects into the Alice 3.0 project. All this is huge and that is why Alice made my “Top 5 Technology Watch List for 2008“. However, it appears my predictions were a little premature and Alice is not really going to make the kind of splash in 2008 that I had hoped. In my opinion there are a number of reasons Alice 3.0 and Alice adoption, in general, has been much slower than I had expected. I think first and foremost the Alice project team needs to read Don Tapscott’s Wikinomics and take a few pages from his book.
- They should put this project on Sourceforge and make it open. You would probably get thousands of dads like me involved on the project if they did this.
- Promote the project in a more collaborative model. First off Alice.org should be Wiki based. Also collaborative development forums should be set up to promote specific goals. See examples…https://secure3.verticali.net/pg-connection-portal/ctx/noauth/0_0_1_4_83_4_3.do http://www.yet2.com/app/about/about/members
- Move this project out of an institutional education mindset. I think everyone agrees that Alice is a great tool for institutional “computer programming” education however, there are great opportunities beyond that niche. The beta program seems to be only open to institutional educators (give me a break). Are they afraid we might harm someone if we don’t have the “Proper Educational Certifications”.
- Make the education course material Open Source. They need to follow their own industries lead on this one.
I am fairly certain that any number of these actions would produce a windfall of donations. Just the announcement of any of the items listed above could create a viral effect. At the risk of sounding cynical… the time is now…
Topics: alice, ot0408, pausch |
