| Java Helps Alice Create a New Wonderland In Lewis Carroll’s classic novel from 1865, a girl named Alice tumbles down a rabbit hole and discovers a fantasy world populated by strange and wondrous creatures. Today, thanks to a team of computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University, students can create their own 3-D animated worlds through a Java technology-enabled teaching tool named after Carroll’s heroine. Designed to be a student’s first exposure to object-oriented programming, Alice uses 3D graphics and a drag-and-drop interface to make learning fun and engaging. In Alice, 3-D objects such as people, animals, and vehicles populate a virtual world, and students create programs to animate the objects. Alice’s interactive interface allows students to see how their animation programs run, enabling them to easily understand the behavior of animated objects. By manipulating the objects in their virtual world, students gain experience with all the programming constructs typically taught in an introductory programming course. Originally conceived as a virtual-reality tool, Alice’s value as educational software soon became apparent. But to fully exploit its possibilities, Professor Wanda Dann, director of the Alice Project, needed to migrate Alice to Java. Moving to Java was essential because it was the world’s most popular programming language, and it enabled programmers to create an environment that was visual instead of just textual. It made programming more appealing, less intimidating, and enabled students to get immediate visual feedback. Now, thousands of colleges and universities in the U.S. and abroad use Alice to teach the concepts of object-oriented languages and Java. Costa Rica has adopted Alice country-wide, and the nation is spearheading the effort to establish Alice throughout South America. | 
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