Alice

Alice is an educational tool designed to help users learn about object-oriented programming through a visual approach. Its goal is to transform the learning process into an interactive experience by enabling students to understand the interaction between various concepts.

Usually, learning OOP programming is associated with code editors and tons of documentations. The Alice developers aim to change the traditional approach in order to make it more appealing to the students that are stimulated by creating 3D, interactive worlds.

The interface of the program is designed to build a virtual world by using methods, statements and functions. However, the user can combine the programming tools by simply dragging and dropping them in the current project, without having to write the code.

In order to facilitate the learning process, the package includes a large gallery with objects, environments and characters that can be combined in order to build the world. The Scene Editor allows you to add the items in the world and customize their position and size.

Each item has a set of procedures that can be applied in order to animate the scene. You can specify the procedures, event listeners, functions and other actions in the Code Editor.

The interface of the application is easy to use but requires some time to become accustomed to all the available tools. Although the program package does not include a detailed documentation, you can find several video tutorials and materials on the developer’s website.

The finished animation can be exported as a video file and uploaded to YouTube directly from the application. For educational purposes, you can use the screen capture tool to take snapshots of the important development steps.

Since it deals with 3D animations, the program requires significant resources to smoothly build, preview and export the animation. It is created with Java which makes it available for multiple platforms.

If you want to learn the basics of 3D object-oriented programming, Alice can provide you with an alternative approach to reading manuals and writing code.