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I work in the areas of human-computer interaction, virtual reality, entertainment technology, and novel approaches to teaching introductory computer programming. I co-founded the Entertainment Technology Center (ETC), a joint initiative between the School of Computer Science and the College of Fine Arts. The ETC's mission is "Leadership in education and research that combines technology and fine arts to create new processes, tools, and vision for storytelling and entertainment." My current research focuses on Alice (www.alice.org). Learning to program computers is hard. While part of this (learning concepts like iteration, conditionals, and recursion) is intrinsic, other aspects of learning to program are unnecessarily hard. Specifically, students often struggle over both syntax and the inability to see the state of their program variables as their program runs. The Alice system, in the spirit of Logo and Karel the Robot, provides an environment based on interactive 3d graphics, where students drag&drop words to form programs, and then view the execution of those programs as an interactive, virtual reality world. A typical line of Alice code might be "bunny.move(forward, 1 meter). " But because that line is constructed interactively, Alice users cannot make syntax errors. And as the program runs, many semantic errors are easily spotted - if the bunny was meant to move backward instead of forward, the animation immediately makes that obvious. Finally, students are heavily motivated to learn to program, because their programs are 3d animated movies! Alice has been distributed to over 1 000 000 users, and a textbook ("Learning to Program with Alice," Dann, Cooper, and Pausch) is now available from Prentice-Hall. In a groundbreaking collaboration with Electronic Arts, the next version of Alice will use the 3D characters and animations from "The Sims," the most popular PC video game in history. For more information, please see the Web Pages: My personal home page : http://www.randypausch.com The Entertainment Technology Center : http://www.etc.cmu.edu/ The Alice Project: http://www.alice.org |
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