Introduction to Alice CS Honors Slides courtesy of Wanda Dann, Ithaca College

Overview 4 Why Alice? 4 Getting Started with Alice Programming –Using the Alice interface –Running an Animation Program 4 Main Goal: –to have you set up and run Alice so you can work with examples and lab exercises

Why Alice? 4 A modern programming tool –3-D graphics –3-D models of objects 4 Animation –3-D models can be made to move around the virtual world 4 Free –

The Power of Alice 4 Automatically keeps track of 3-D objects –what objects are in the virtual world –types of object –where they are currently located 4 Automatically manages memory –dynamically allocates memory –reclaims memory when a world is closed or an object is destroyed

Built-ins 4 To animate the 3-D objects, Alice has many standard operations 4 Examples: –move –turn –roll –resize –setcolor

Libraries 4 You can import program code from available resources 4 Libraries provide additional operations for working with –numbers (math computations) –strings (characters, text)

Quick to Learn and Use 4 Can learn to use –interface in a couple of lab sessions 4 Can learn to create –a simple animation in a matter of minutes –a non-trivial animation in a few lab sessions

Demo 4 How to use the Alice interface –interactive command line –menu selections –smart editor 4 How to run an Alice program for animating a 3-D object