Wed, 28 Aug 2002
Randy Pausch and Alice
Since I was headed up to CMU tomorrow to speak at GSIA, I needed to make a trip over there to figure out where in the hell I was going since I hadn't been over there in ten years. I noticed on the HCII web site that Randy Pausch was giving a talk this afternoon so I emailed Brad Myers and asked if it was open to the public. Brad was kind enough to reply quickly and said that indeed, the seminars are open to the public and asked about HCI at my company. So Bryan and I decided to go over and listen to Randy's talk.
A lot of things have changed at CMU in ten years. Among them, there's been a lot of remodeling indoors. The outdoors didn't look much different to me, but the insides sure looked fancier than I remember them. Also, the pervasive wireless that others have talked about is everywhere. And the kids look younger to me. I think I'm getting old. Sigh. The array of Titanium Powerbooks that the students are using is pretty impressive, but I digress.
Pausch's talk was amazing. He demonstrated a system called Alice which is being purposed to teach introductory programming concepts to non-majors and even junior high school students. The system that we saw was impressive but I don't believe that it's available on the web just yet. It provides an IDE in which the student can build programming language elements by dragging and dropping. When the student plays the program, a small window displays the animation of a character in a 3D virtual world. Pausch emphasized that their intent is to teach the semantics of programming instead of getting bogged down in the syntax. He said that this approach has met some resistance with traditional CS folks but has been very successful when tested on old women and young people.
I found Pausch's talk compelling since he's a rare find in the academic world - a gifted researcher, orator, and humorist. We're intending on attending as many of these seminars as we can this fall as we had a lot of fun and would like to meet more like-minded folks. It's exhilirating.
Posted at: 21:22 | permalink
