Testimonials from Alice users

"Just wanted to thank you folks for putting out such a great, free product for educational use. I have just been using Alice with a group of gifted and talented sixth graders. After going through the Alice help document step-by-step and letting the students practice the different parts of the program, I let them loose and WOW! The user interface is so intuitive that in 20 minutes we had kids with 30 or 40 lines of code! Thanks so much for creating a powerful interface which is so easy to use that it almost obviates the need for teaching!"

-- Nathan Carter, VP for Technology, Teach for America

"Alice is the perfect tool to introduce students to object-oriented programming. It keeps them happy with a clean, drag-and-drop interface where they can actually see how their programs work. Even better, it allows me to teach them the fundamental computer science concepts such as type and inheritance in a pain-free, intuitive fashion."

-- Jacob Kaufman-Osborn, Computer Science Teacher, McKinley Technology High School, Washington, DC http://mths.k12.dc.us/

"I used Alice this year in both semesters of my Pre-AP course and the kids loved it. The idea of 3D animation has already created a great deal of interest from more kids for next year. I'd highly recommend it. I use it for about the first 4 or 5 weeks, and it quickly teaches them about if/else statements, loops, objects, methods, and even recursion, which makes the transition into real programming quite smooth. The resources available online are fantastic, and have worked so well that I am considering ordering the book for my kids for next year."

-- Meghan Emilio, Computer Science Teacher, The Potomac School, McLean, VA http://www.potomacschool.org/

"Wow! Super cool. My twelve-year-old daughter picked it up and had stuff flying all over the place. I had to demand that she stop playing with it and get back to studying for her middle school exams. I also informed here that she had just learned how to program."

-- John, Faculty at Michigan

"[I] am evaluating Alice as a high school intro course prior to a Java 1 course. You must be told often, but Alice is a brilliant idea and implementation. I already teach student classes and workshops using other university-produced programs (StarLogo from MIT, and NetLogo from Northwestern, to mention a couple), and find Alice to be quite phenomenal. [We] are also contemplating including Alice in a series of game development/programming/CS student workshops downstream in association with the Santa Fe Institute, MIT, and the New Mexico Supercomputing Challenge.

I just wanted to introduce myself and give you a huge pat on the back (and to your associates) for doing such a good job with Alice."

-- Greg Malone, Director of Technology, Desert Academy, Santa Fe, NM

"Just wanted to let you know that we are using ALICE for the first time this semester at Penn State University, Schuylkill campus. We have incorporated it into a redesign of our IST 110 (Information, People, and Technology) course and the student response has been great. The course serves both non-majors and Information Sciences and Technology (IST) majors, both of whom have been very enthusiastic about ALICE. Our IST majors who are concurrently enrolled in our CS1 course (Java-based) have openly asked "why don't we use this in CS1?" (alas, that is out of our control)."

-- Jeffrey A. Stone, M.S. Instructor of IST Penn State-Schuylkill Campus

"Hi, I have just started using Alice along with the text book. I have to say it is a superb programming environment, a pleasure to use, so congratulations to all who created it. The thought of going back to text based programming is quite repulsive. If only someone could create a development environment which combined the benefits of visual studio along with the drag and drop programming style of Alice, it would revolutionise application development."

-- Ken Singleton, ICT Technician, Royd Hall High School

"I develop 3D systems for educational applications.  Alice has been tremendously valuable to us in helping us to quickly prototype our designs and get a feeling for how things might work.  Randy Pausch has succeeded in creating a very accessible 3D tool--more accessible than any other I've seen."

-- Amy Bruckman, Assistant Professor, College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA

"I used Alice for one assignment in the course I taught last spring here in the Computer Science Department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The course was 'Exploring Virtual Worlds' (Comp239), which is UNC's course on virtual reality and related topics. The Alice software worked well, and Randy's lectures on it were valuable to the course.

As you may know, creating 3D computer graphics animations or interactive applications using 3D graphics usually requires the programmer to be fluent with 3D vectors, transformation matrices, texture coordinates, and a number of related mathematical topics.  This dependence on 'difficult' math (difficult for the population at large) prevents many potential authors from creating an intuitive programmer's interface to 3D graphics so that it can be accessible to the 'programmer on the street.' Alice has several good ideas in it, which I believe originated with Randy and his team. My favorite is giving objects a front, side, and top (rather than X, Y, and Z axes) so that you can tell the object to go backward or turn left (rather than translate in the minus-X direction or rotate around the Z-axis). This may sound trivial, but it is a major conceptual simplification."

-- Warren Robinett, Computer Science Department, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC

"Since the days of the first compiler, the most revolutionary software systems have been those that enable new sets of users to take full advantage of powerful new hardware. Their new viewpoints and problem sets inevitably lead to new worlds of previously undreamt-of applications. In Alice I see this potential.

Alice makes high powered 3D animation and graphics available to users who may have never considered becoming programmers. It shows them new worlds, one easy step at a time. Who can predict the fruit of the seeds that Alice sews?"

-- Tom Neuendorffer, Senior Systems Developer and Head of Prototype Development, Claritech Corp.

"We at the University of Central Florida are engaged in an extended and in-depth analysis of the educational possibilities of virtual environments. We have built several virtual world systems of our own, and used most of the ones available from other sources. The Alice system from Carnegie Mellon University is one of the most important of these environments.

In the course CAP4021, Building Virtual Worlds, we usually have students use Alice for one of the early required projects, and then allow students to choose one of several systems for their capstone project.  The distinguishing features of Alice for this purpose are its ease of use and very rapid learnability. We have seen a steady increase in the number of students who choose Alice for their main project, and some of the projects have been very creative.

Alice has served as a flexible and powerful testbed for a number of important research studies at CMU which are often cited and admired in the VR community. Alice's reliability and elegance of design make it one of the cornerstones of VR for education and research, and we expect to make increased use of it in future years."

-- Michael Moshell, Professor of Computer Science, University of Central Florida

"Alice was a really fantastic software to be using for Building Virtual Worlds. It was extremely easy to learn and use, and produced such amazing virtual reality worlds. More important than it's ease of use, however, is how effective a learning tool it turned out to be. I was a painter for the course, so going into the course I already knew how to draw and paint. However, I didn't know anything about CAD modeling or programming. Over the semester I took BVW, I learned to model and have become quite proficient at it. I even learned a little programming; While I didn't realize I was learning any programming at the time, when I started taking 15-125 this semester, I was already familiar with all of the basic concepts. While obviously I didn't learn to model using Alice (Alice isn't used for that) it was definitely why I learned that skill."

-- Joe Hocking, Building Virtual Worlds student

"Most computer-generated-imagery rendering systems are intended for either computer professionals, or for graphics artists and animators. The novelty of Alice is that it is intended for use by a student. In fact, by a fairly inexperienced student just learning computer graphics. My daughter, at age eleven, was able to make some images with Alice. Not at the level of a college student, of course, but still an impressive testimonial for the results of Randy's work.

The simple, clear design, as well as the speed with which one can make changes and just 'experiment' are what makes Alice unique and valuable in an academic setting. I also applaud Randy and his students for the effort they've invested in teaching people to use the system at locations like the SIGGRAPH conference."

-- Anselmo Lastra, Research Associate Professor, University of North Carolina

"Authoring tools are key to the future of advanced computing applications for the simple reason that users will require richer media experiences to keep track of increased complexity, and those experiences will have to be continuously redesigned on an ongoing basis. No one yet knows how to accomplish the design process as quickly cheaply as will be required. This is a profound bottleneck that must be overcome.

Dr. Pausch has probably come closer than anyone else to demonstrating solutions in this area. Alice has been tested with a wider variety of users than any other authoring tool and has produced a wider variety of output. I have had the privilege of speaking to Dr. Pausch's Alice design class at CMU, and I was simply thrilled by the level of energy and productivity. I believe that support of Dr. Pausch's work is vital to the future of advanced computing interfaces, and I hope circumstances arise in the future that will allow me to once again contribute to that support. Please feel free to contact me if I can be of any service."

-- Jaron Lanier, Scientist and Artist, coined the term "Virtual Reality"

"Let me say how impressed I am by the Alice engine and how joyous I am at finding your pages. Alice is a stellar accomplishment."

-- David L. Rice, Web Applications Designer

"I've been doing 2D graphics design for 10 years, but Alice is my first venture into 3D and/or animation. I've only been using Alice for 2 weeks but I love it/her! Thanks, again!"

-- Ray George

"I have to say that I have really enjoyed the Alice amulet because it showed me how interesting programming 3D animations really is. It never caused me any trouble, and it always worked perfectly."

-- Pedro Huitema