In case you have some free time on President’s Day, here are of couple of things for you to take a look at.
Learn about Alice. While many of you are here to learn about DOCSIS, you may want to take an opportunity to find out the latest in educational software training out of Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). Alice is an innovative 3D programming environment that makes it easy to create an animation for telling a story, playing an interactive game, or a video to share on the web. Alice is a freely available teaching tool designed to be a student’s first exposure to object-oriented programming. It allows students to learn fundamental programming concepts in the context of creating animated movies and simple video games. In Alice, 3-D objects (e.g., people, animals, and vehicles) populate a virtual world and students create a program to animate the objects. Children to adults are learning Java, C++, and C# using Alice. Check it out and download it for free at Alice.org.
If you got excited about Alice, you may want to take the time to learn about one of the key creators of Alice, Randy Pausch. There is a poster of him in Atlanta airport which I frequently walk past, but only recently came to understand who he was through YouTube. His story is quite moving and his message will definitely have an impact on you. I cannot end without any better closing than Randy’s Last Lecture…
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