Go Ask Alice

Alice 2.0 is an innovative 3D programming environment developed by Carnegie Mellon that makes it easy to create an animation for telling a story, playing an interactive game, or a video to share on the web. It uses 3D graphics and a drag-and-drop interface to facilitate a more engaging, less frustrating first programming experience. This is not only a great way to teach math and programming skills to kids, but is also a digital storytelling tool that can be used to augment any type of curriculum.

Alice 2.0 is designed for High School and college students, but there is also a stortytelling version for Middle School Students. My daughter (age 11) downloaded the regular version, watched the tutorials and within a couple hours and created a couple short animations. I decided to try my hand at this as well and put together this short animation in about 15 minutes (okay maybe it shows!):



A new version of Alice is in development now in collaboration with Electronic Arts. This new version will utlize characters and models from the popular Sims 2 game. Hopefully it will also come with better export capabilities. With the current version there is no easy way to save out animations to post or share.

I did download the beta version (2.2) which supposedly saves out .mov files, but could not get it to work. I had to utilize a third party screen capture utility to create the avi example above.

I would love to hear from educators that have succesfully utilized Alice in their classrooms at the secondary school level.

The Digital Storytelling Challenge

Digital storytelling is a great way for students to gain experience with 21st century skills such as creativity, innovation, communication, critical thinking, media literacy, and technology literacy among others. It is the art of weaving together digital content such as still images, video, voice over and music to create a narrative movie.

In the Davis Digital Storytelling Challenge students create and submit their own digital stories with the chance to win cash prizes of $500, $300, and $100, and also have their work published online at http://www.schoolartsonline.com/ in May 2009.

Participating students sign up for a workshop to get more information about the requirements and process and also need a teacher or parent to sponsor them. The goal is to tell a personal story about an object, a person, an event, or a place that profoundly impacted you or someone you know. The final submissions can be no longer than two minutes total.

This competition is open to K-12 students with three different age levels of competition. Deadline for submission is April 15, 2009. For more information visit the digication.com website. For examples, view the the winning digital stories from last year's challenge here.