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RoboCatz.com

Storytelling Alice

This is free software from Carnegie Mellon University.

An Educational Software that teaches students computer programming in a 3D environment Alice is an innovative 3D programming environment that makes it easy to create an animation for telling a story, playing an interactive game, or a video to share on the web. Alice is a freely available teaching tool designed to be a student's first exposure to object-oriented programming. It allows students to learn fundamental programming concepts in the context of creating animated movies and simple video games.

In Alice, 3-D objects (e.g., people, animals, and vehicles) populate a virtual world and students create a program to animate the objects. In Alice's interactive interface, students drag and drop graphic tiles to create a program, where the instructions correspond to standard statements in a production oriented programming language, such as Java, C++, and C#.

Alice allows students to immediately see how their animation programs run, enabling them to easily understand the relationship between the programming statements and the behavior of objects in their animation.

By manipulating the objects in their virtual world, students gain experience with all the programming constructs typically taught in an introductory programming course.

Where to Download

There are two locations you can download Alice from. Please note that the Alice installation program is large (over 120 megabytes and contains about 1200 files). Please be very patient when you click on the links to install the software. Depending on the speed of your internet connection, this software could take 5 to 15 minutes to download. Once you download or run the ZIP file, the computer will prompt you to store the files in a particular location. Make sure you enter a file location that you will remember. If you think you may forget where the file is stored, write down its location.

A version of Storytelling Alice is available for downloading from our website at:

  1. StorytellingAlice.zip (ZIP file (120 Megabytes))
  2. StorytellingAlice.exe (Executable ZIP file (120 Megabytes))
To download from the original Storytelling Alice website, go to:
  1. http://www.alice.org/kelleher/storytelling/download.html
Please note: This download file is a ZIP file. This means that the installation file is contained in ("zipped") another file (i.e., the ZIP file). You basically have to extract the files from the ZIP file in order to access the installation file.

More Information About Alice

Storytelling Alice was created by Caitlin Kelleher as part of her doctoral work in Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. Click here.

Background: In contrast to the large number of people who use computers and computer programs in their daily lives, relatively few learn to create their own computer programs. Storytelling Alice is a programming environment designed to motivate a broad spectrum of middle school students to learn to program computers through creating short 3D animated movies.