Michelle Venable-Foster June 2006

Michelle Venable-Foster June 2006
Introduction to Alice Michelle Venable-Foster June 2006 Adventures in Animation

Adventures in Animation
What is Alice? Alice (software), is a freeware introductory object-oriented programming software produced by Carnegie-Mellon, an educational programming language. Alice uses a drag and drop environment to create computer animations. It is named after Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland! Adventures in Animation

What is Alice? You can create animations using 3-D models that can move around a virtual world! The latest version of Alice can be downloaded for free at: Adventures in Animation

What Kinds Of Movies Can We Make?
There are two types of animations that we can make: Movie – the user just watches the animation. This is called passive. Interactive – the user types on the keyboard or uses the mouse to make events happen. Adventures in Animation

What’s Coming? EA has agreed to help underwrite the development of Alice 3.0 – a popular, object-oriented, Java-based computer-programming environment created by Carnegie Mellon researchers – and provide essential arts assets from “The Sims™” – the best selling PC video game of all time. Adventures in Animation

Compare Current Alice With Sims Alice!
Current version of Alice New version of Alice! Adventures in Animation

Let’s Get Started! You should first locate the Alice folder on your computer and double-click the Alice icon that looks like this: Adventures in Animation

Let’s Get Started! You will see the Welcome to Alice! dialog box - Adventures in Animation

A Little Techno-speak! The Welcome to Alice! dialog box is in front of the Alice Integrated Development Environment (IDE). An IDE is a computer program that is used to write other computer programs. The Alice IDE is sometimes called the Alice interface. Adventures in Animation

Let’s Look At Some Examples!
Click on the Examples tab at the top of your Welcome to Alice! dialog box. Adventures in Animation

Let’s Look at Some Examples!
Spend the next few minutes viewing the examples in Alice. Click on the animation you want to view, and click on the Open button. When the world opens up, click on the Play button: The campers should spend about 10 minutes viewing the 6 or 7 animations in the Examples folder (depending on which version of Alice you have). You should know how to control the volume on the computers, because some of the animations have sound! Make sure that the campers are on task during this activity. There are also some examples in folders named, “highschoolexamples” and “secondaryexamples” inside of the main Alice folder. Adventures in Animation

Let’s Look At The Tabs The Welcome to Alice! dialog box has five tabs: Tutorial, Recent Worlds, Templates, Examples, and Open a world. Adventures in Animation

The Tutorial Tab Click on the Tutorial tab. You will see 4 tutorials. We won’t be doing these now, but, you can come back to them during any “free time” we have, or at home. When you are ready to view a tutorial, you can either click on the Start the Tutorial button or directly on one of the tutorial screenshots. Adventures in Animation

The Recent Worlds Tab Click on the Recent Worlds tab. You will see screenshots of the most recently saved Alice worlds. If no worlds have been saved since Alice was installed on your computer, this tab will say no recent worlds. Adventures in Animation

The Templates Tab Click on the Templates tab. You will see 6 blank templates for starting a virtual world – dirt, grass, sand, snow, space, and water. Adventures in Animation

The Open a world Tab We’ve already looked at the Examples tab, so let’s click on the Open a world tab. This is the tab you will use to access other worlds saved to your computer. Adventures in Animation

Let’s Make A Movie! Let’s jump right in and start making our own animation! You can get back to the original screen by choosing File > New World. If you’re asked to save the world you were viewing, just say no. Adventures in Animation

Choose Your Background!
Just to get us started, choose one of the templates for your virtual world. Double-click the background you want to play with. It’s not really important which one you choose now; this is just to get your feet wet! Adventures in Animation

Let’s Add Some Objects To Our World
For right now, think of an object as anything that can do something! Click on the Add Objects button – Adventures in Animation

You will see a Gallery of objects that you can add to your world. Make sure to scroll to the right to see all of the available galleries. Adventures in Animation

Select a category and look at the different objects that you can add. You can get back to the main level by clicking on Local Gallery. Adventures in Animation

Create Your Own Person! If you choose the People category in the Local Gallery and scroll all the way to the right, there are two icons called hebuilder and shebuilder. Adventures in Animation

Create Your Own Person! If you choose either one of these, you will bring up the Person Builder dialog screen. You can “create” your own person using your mouse and the choices for each body part and clothing item available! When you’re done, make sure to give your person a name and type your own name next to the box that says, Created By. Have the students spend a few minutes creating their own person. They don’t have to use this in their animation. Adventures in Animation

Adding Objects To Our World
Once you’ve chosen which object you’d like to add to your world, select it by clicking on it and then clicking the button that says, “Add instance to world”. Adventures in Animation

More Techno-speak We are going to be created our animations using an object-oriented program, so we need to discuss what that means! We are going to discuss what a class, an object, and methods are. Adventures in Animation

Techno-speak A class describes what an object of a particular type is made of, what is knows about itself and what it can do. A class is merely a description. It is like a plan for a house. Before you build a house, you should have a plan. Once you have a plan, however, you can build any number of similar houses. Some examples of classes are Houses, Students, MP3 Players, etc. Have the students talk about other classes. Adventures in Animation

Examples of Classes Dog – it knows its name, size, breed it can bark, eat, sleep Song – it knows its title and its artist it can play Cat – it knows its name, size, breed it can meow, sleep, purr Have the campers give more class examples along with what it “knows” about itself and what it can do. Adventures in Animation

All About Objects What an object “knows” about itself is its instance variables or properties. Each instance (copy of the object) has its own instance variables. What an object “can do” is its methods. What instance variables and methods might a Television have? Television – might have these instance variables ( channel, number of channels, size, type, volume, etc.) It might have these methods ( changeVolume, changeChannel, setAlarm, etc.) Adventures in Animation

Back To Alice! If you click on the (+) sign next to the name of the object that you’ve added to the world, you will see all of the parts that your object is made of: Adventures in Animation

3 Dimensions, 6 Directions
Each object has height, length, and depth It also has 6 directions in which it can move: **Very important – make sure the campers realize that the left and right directions are based on the Object, not the viewer! Adventures in Animation

Modify Your Object You can modify the instance of your object by using these tools: Using these tools you can, Move Objects Freely, Move Objects Up and Down, Turn Objects Left and Right, Turn Objects Forwards and Backwards, Tumble Objects, Resize Objects, and Copy Objects – just by using your mouse. Spend the next few minutes experimenting with these tools. Adventures in Animation

Modify Your Object You can undo or redo your last moves by clicking on the appropriate buttons: Adventures in Animation

Deleting An Object Right-click on the object and choose delete. Watch the object spin away! Adventures in Animation

Posing Your Object You can move just one part of your object by either clicking the box next to affect subparts, and moving it with your mouse, or by choosing the part you want to move in the Object Tree. Adventures in Animation

Let’s Make Our Object Move!
The first thing you need to do is make sure that you have an object in your world! Click on the big button. This will return you to the standard Alice interface. Adventures in Animation

To make objects move in your world, you need to use methods for the objects. Every method has two parts: the name of the object associated with the method (which comes before the period) and the name of the method itself (which comes after the period.) Adventures in Animation

Click on the name of the object in the Object Tree you’d like to move: Adventures in Animation

Make sure that you click on the Methods tab in the Details section. Adventures in Animation

Find a method you want to use and drag it out to the middle of world.my first method in the Editor area. A short menu may ask you for more information, such as, direction or amount you want to move. Information that you must give to a method whenever you use that method is called a method parameter. Adventures in Animation

Play The Movie! I know we haven’t done too much so far, but, let’s test our animation by playing the movie. Click the Play button near the upper-left corner of the Alice interface. Cool, huh? Click the Restart button to play the world again, and then click Stop to return to the Alice interface. Adventures in Animation

Advanced Coding Techniques
You can group methods by using the commands at the bottom of the Editor area. Do in order – will run the code (tiles) one after the other Do together – will run the code at the same time. When the campers begin to make their objects do more intricate movements, they will want to use the Do Together command to ensure that the whole object moves together, not just parts of it. Adventures in Animation

Moving Code You can move lines of code (tiles) by dragging the dotted left-hand corner of the block. The move that you’re attempting is “legal” if you see a green bar! Adventures in Animation

Deleting Code You can delete lines of code in two different ways: You can drag the line of code into the trashcan icon. You can right-click on the line of code that you want to delete, and select delete. Adventures in Animation

For the next few minutes, I want you to experiment with Alice by using the methods available for the object in your world. When you get something cool, please let me see it! Let the campers play with Alice for about 10 minutes or so. Circulate the room and make sure that they are on-task. Adventures in Animation

Posing An Object You can “pose” an object by right-clicking the object in the Object Tree and selecting Methods and choosing the pose you’d like! Adventures in Animation

Quad Views In the Object Editor screen, you can choose Quad View, which will give you 4 different views of your object at the same time! Adventures in Animation

Quad View You can click and drag on either of the views to see what you object looks like at all 4 views! You can also Zoom and Move the view. (click on the picture to see a movie) Adventures in Animation

Camera Controls The curved arrow on the right is the camera’s tilt control. It is used to tilt the camera up or down, similarly to the way that you might tilt your head up or down. Have the campers experiment with this camera control while you’re on this slide. Adventures in Animation

Camera Controls The center control is a mixed control, to zoom and pan the camera. A camera can zoom in and zoom out, and pan left and pan right. Zooming in means the camera is moved in closer to get a tighter shot of something. Zooming out means the camera is moved out farther to get a longer shot of something, so that it becomes smaller on the screen. Panning means to turn the camera left or right without moving the position of the camera In Alice, you can pan and zoom at the same time. Adventures in Animation

Camera Controls The left set of arrows at the bottom of the world window is the move control, which provides controls to move the camera left and right, and up and down These controls move the position of the camera Have the campers take a few minutes to play with the camera controls. Adventures in Animation

Adding Sounds! Most of the objects in Alice have the ability to play a sound! Locate the method that says object.playSound You can either play one of the sounds in the Alice library or import one of your own! Adventures in Animation

Importing Sounds! Using the drop-down menu, select Import Sound. Navigate to the sound file on your computer that you’d like to use. You can only use .wav or .mp3 audio files in Alice animations. Adventures in Animation

Recording Sounds! You can record your own sounds to use in Alice by selecting record new sound in the drop-down menu. Give your sound file a name, so you will be able to find it later. When you’re ready, press the record button and speak into the microphone! If you have enough microphones for all of the campers, allow each of them to practice recording a voice audio file to import into Alice. Adventures in Animation

Create An Animation! For the rest of the afternoon, you are to create your very first original animation in Alice. Try to either tell a story, entertain your audience, or create an interactive movie. Remember to be appropriate and spell your words correctly! Save your animation as Lastname_Alice1. Adventures in Animation

Michelle Venable-Foster June 2006

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