Learning to Program with Alice

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0131872893 ISBN 13: 9780131872899

Publisher: Prentice Hall, 2005

This guide supports an innovative approach to fundamental programming concepts. The authors use program visualization to create an easy relationship between program construct and the animation action in a 3D world. Final release is in full color. For consistency with Java, C++, and other commonly used languages, "questions" are now "functions." Save and reload bugs have been fixed. Fonts can be scaled larger or smaller. High contrast mode is available for projection in the classroom. A much larger local gallery is now loaded with Alice; the CD with the book contains the complete gallery, so Internet access for downloading 3D models is no longer required. A useful how-to guide for programmers interested in learning Alice.

About the Author:

Wanda Dann is Associate Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. Her research has encompassed program visualization and object-oriented and event-driven programming. She has published papers on the use of program visualization in computer science education for SIGCSE, the Computer Science Education Journal, and related publications. She has been co-PI for three NSF-funded projects. She is an active member of the ITiCSE Visualization Working Group, studying the effectiveness of visualization in computer science education. She has taken on a major leadership role in the international computer science education community, serving as SIGCSE 2004 Program co-Chair and SIGCSE 2005 Symposium co-Chair.

Stephen Cooper is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Saint Joseph's University. He taught previously at Rivier College, serving as Computer Science program director. He has also worked at IBM as a systems programmer. Dr. Cooper's research interests lie in the semantics of programming languages as well as in program visualization. He is the author or co-author of a dozen articles, and has been the principal investigator for several National Science Foundation and private grants.

Randy Pausch is a Professor of Computer Science, Human-Computer Interaction, and Design at Carnegie Mellon, where he is the co-director of CMU’s Entertainment Technology Center (ETC).  He was a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator and a Lilly Foundation Teaching Fellow. He has done Sabbaticals at Walt Disney Imagineering  (WDI) and Electronic Arts (EA), and has consulted with Disney on user interfaces for interactive theme park attractions and with Google on user interface design. Dr. Pausch is the author or co-author of five books and over 70 articles, is the director of the Alice software project, and has been in zero gravity.