Introduction to Alice

CS 110 - Honors

Slides courtesy of Wanda Dann, Ithaca College

Overview

Why Alice? Getting Started with Alice Programming

– Using the Alice interface– Running an Animation Program

Main Goal:– to have you set up and run Alice so you can

work with examples and lab exercises

Why Alice?

A modern programming tool– 3-D graphics– 3-D models of objects

Animation– 3-D models can be made to move around the

virtual world

Free– www.alice.org

The Power of Alice

Automatically keeps track of 3-D objects – what objects are in the virtual world– types of object– where they are currently located

Automatically manages memory– dynamically allocates memory– reclaims memory when a world is closed or an

object is destroyed

Built-ins

To animate the 3-D objects, Alice has many standard operations

Examples:– move– turn– roll– resize– setcolor

Libraries

You can import program code from available resources

Libraries provide additional operations for working with– numbers (math computations)– strings (characters, text)

Quick to Learn and Use

Can learn to use– interface in a couple of lab sessions

Can learn to create – a simple animation in a matter of minutes– a non-trivial animation in a few lab sessions

Demo

How to use the Alice interface– interactive command line– menu selections– smart editor

How to run an Alice program for animating a 3-D object