Alice 3 Cookbook

79 recipes to harness the power of Alice 3 for teaching students to build attractive and interactive 3D scenes and videos

• A cookbook for teachers who would like to demonstrate the basics of programming by creating marvelous animated scenes
• Work with the new Alice 3 environment to add instances and inspect their properties, procedures, and functions
• Develop interactive 3D scenes and videos with Alice 3
• The book covers the new Sims module incorporated in Alice 3

In Detail

Alice is a free and 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 teaching tool designed as a revolutionary approach to teaching and learning introductory programming concepts.

Alice 3 Cookbook focuses on performing common tasks required in classrooms with Alice 3. The recipes target teachers who would like to take advantage of this exciting 3D environment in their classrooms and/or labs.

Alice 3 uses 3D graphics and a drag-and-drop interface to facilitate a more engaging, less frustrating programming experience. Each recipe provides step-by-step instructions that allow you to learn the most important Alice features by example. You will learn about everything from the addition of the initial actors, up to the advanced procedures to react to the keyboard and mouse input.

You will work with the different elements that compose a scene and learn how to change the values for properties and run simple methods. Discover how to create simple animations that will allow you to recognize the most important elements of the user interface and explore the models provided by Alice to use them in games.

A cookbook for teachers filled with practical recipes for showing students how to build scenes with animations and videos, using Alice 3

What you will learn from this book

• Browse galleries with 3D models to add them as actors to a scene
• Work with keyboard and mouse input to create interactive stories
• Set scenes with live backgrounds, moving actors, and background music
• Add animals, people, and objects, and define simple and complex behaviors
• Work with parts of characters and people to create realistic animations
• Use local variables in procedures and functions to solve complex algorithms
• Use counters and loops and evaluate expressions to run conditional code
• Combine many sub-expressions with logical operators and relational operators
• Customize and animate a person’s body and make the person interact with the environment
• Control multiple cameras to create realistic experiences

Approach

Part of Packt’s cookbook series, each chapter focuses on a different aspect of working with Alice. Each recipe has practical, step-by-step instructions with lots of screenshots.

Who this book is written for

This book is designed primarily for teachers developing education plans and willing to exploit 3D environments using Alice 3. Alice users who want to improve their Alice programming skills will also find this book useful as it offers innovative 3D models in action.

Some basic knowledge of Alice and how it works is necessary, although you are not expected to have worked with version 3 before.