Re: Tribute To Randy Pausch

[Noah Kantrowitz]

Ton van Overbeek wrote:

Eben Eliason wrote:

I had the opportunity to study under Randy during his last year at the
Entertainment Technology Center, before Jesse (formerly of Disney
Imagineering) took over.  His Building Virtual Worlds course was the
most time consuming yet most rewarding educational experience I've
ever had.  He was an amazing teacher, as well as a fun-loving and
charismatic person.  He will surely be missed.

I haven't personally experimented with Alice, but I have seen it in
action and it looks like a pretty valuable tool for those just
learning to think like a programmer, without the need to overcome the
syntax hurdle.  However, it's also a fairly dense UI (lots of stuff on
screen), so there may be some issues making everything legible on our
smaller screens.  I'm also not sure how well the XO will handle the
real-time 3D rendering, but some experimentation with this would be
welcome.

- Eben


On Fri, Aug 15, 2008 at 9:31 AM, Greg Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

Hi All,

I'd like to take a moment to respectfully mark the passing of Randy Pausch.

I wasn't aware of him before he died but it looks like his work
(http://download.srv.cs.cmu.edu/~pausch/Randy/oldRandyPage.html) was
very relevant for our project. It seems like he was one of "us" (not
that I'm of the same caliber).

Has anyone used Alice: http://www.alice.org/ and is it something we
should consider for the XO?

I like his focus on entertainment and fun in the educational process. I
think the XO would benefit from more excitement and pizazz in our
activities.

Thanks,

Greg S

I did not know about Alice until I read Greg's announcement.
Poked a little bit around on the Alice site.

accelerated 3D (requires GL).
It seems to me the XO-1 hardware is not powerful enough for Alice.
It would need a complete rewrite of the lower levels to bring it down
to what the XO can handle.
But I sure would like to see Alice on the XO ...
Something for the next Google Summer of Code ?

The whole thing is implemented in java with some JNI (Java Native Interface) for rendering using hardware

I'm pretty sure Squeak, which eToys is based on, has Alice support built-in.

--Noah

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