A.L.I.C.E. (http://www.alice.org/) is a 3D programming environment for the creation of an animation for telling a story, playing an interactive game, or a video to share on the web. It is described as a free teaching tool that allows students to learn fundamental programming concepts in the context of creating animated movies and simple video games. In A.L.I.C.E. 3-D objects (e.g., people, animals, and vehicles) populate a virtual world and students create a program to animate the objects. A.L.I.C.E. is free open source software: the A.L.I.C.E. project is based at Carnegie Mellon University.

At a MirandaMod held at the WLE Centre, Institute of Education, University of London, Dai Barnes explains how – and why – he uses Alice to teach his classes how to create virtual worlds.

Dai Barnes is Head of Academic and In-Curriculum ICT at St Benedict’s School, Ealing. He qualified as a teacher in 1995 and spent eighteen months as a supply teacher in a broad range of London schools. Hestarted work as a full-time ICT teacher at a secondary school where he was quickly promoted to Head of Department. Since then he has worked in schools with various ICT responsibilities, but using technology in his classroom only became brilliant after attending a MirandaMod where he started to develop his Personal Learning Network on Twitter and began participating in the EdTechRoundUp weekly podcasts. More information cxan be found on his google profile:
http://www.google.com/profiles/daibarnes.

You can follow Dai, the teacher who ran these lessons, on Twitter: @daibarnes, or his blog.

You can follow Dai Barnes on Twitter: @daibarnes, or his blog.