alice-teacher Instancing in Alice, dynamic list creation, repository of 3rd party material

[John Jannone]

Thanks so much for your detailed response Don.

It felt in our design meetings that this would be pushing students into more advanced concepts for an introductory programming tool

My two cents on this would be to err on the side of including as much functionality as possible in the graphical environment, for a few reasons:

1. Many students will never make the transition to code, and it’s great to have an approachable tool that offers the possibility of a deep introduction the kind of procedural thinking and problem solving that coding requires and trains, without the code.

2. I've seen a lot of students hit a conceptual wall when moving from node to code, particularly neurologically unique students and other different thinkers.

3. Relatedly, I think it’s nice in general to not set too low a “barrier” to advancing into more advanced concepts, i.e. “yes, you can do that, but you'd need to learn Java/Javascript/Lua/etc…” (however I can see another side to this coin as well…)

I teach primarily in Max/MSP these days in part because of point 3: unlike many of the great graphical tools out there, there is never a need to script; while scripting is available, the environment is complete as a graphical tool, allowing the motivated student to go very deep.

I’ve always loved the concept of Alice, and I look forward to new developments in the project.

Best regards,

John

On Nov 29, 2020, at 2:22 PM, Donald Slater via alice-teachers <alice-teachers at lists.andrew.cmu.edu<mailto:alice-teachers at lists.andrew.cmu.edu>> wrote:

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John,
Unfortunately, there is not a way to instantiate objects in a Scene. You have to do what you describe, add them to the Scene and to the list before hand in Scene setup, particularly if you are adding them. To become part of the Scene. It is an obvious functionality, one that I have wished for myself, but the design of Alice, the design of the Gallery (suppose you wanted to instantiate a Sim person - how do you easily set all the different values for age, gender, skin tone, body shape, hair style, clothing). Or making sure the object when instantiated is placed properly in the 3D virtual word so that it is guaranteed to be in camera view?)

It felt in our design meetings that this would be pushing students into more advanced concepts for an introductory programming tool (and reasonable minds can choose to differ on the decision). If you export your Alice 3 project into the NetBeans version, where you have access to the entire Java Class Library, you are able to instantiate new objects as needed. If you are working with Alice in NetBeans, then your students are probably ready to explore this topic.

For the same ready that you cannot dynamically instantiate objects, you are not able to dynamically instantiate links. But perhaps I misunderstand your question.

We are in the process of creating a GiHub repository for Alice, and we are hopeful that the type of material you describe will appear there. But that work is in process, and I am not sure where the development team is in the work.

Thank you for your interest in Alice.

All the best,
Don Slater

Alice Project

On Nov 28, 2020, at 1:38 PM, John Jannone <Jannone at brooklyn.cuny.edu<mailto:Jannone at brooklyn.cuny.edu>> wro
Dear Alice Educators,

I’m wondering if new objects can somehow be instantiated a scene - e.g. every time the wizard says a spell, a new instance of "crystal ball" appears at the location of her right hand; or at startup generate a forest of 30 randomly placed trees (without having to create all 30 and add them to a list)? I can’t seem to find this in documentation nor by poking around Alice’s functions, but it seems an obvious kind of functionality.

As a related secondary question, can lists be generated from existing objects, e.g. for each object of type tree, and an entry to list allTrees?

These are maybe custom Java functions that someone has already created - is there a library or repository of 3rd party material somewhere?

Thanks!

John

John J.A. Jannone
Director, Camp Ballibay for the Fine & Performing Arts  http://campBallibay.com <https://www.campballibay.com/>  @campBallibay <https://www.instagram.com/campballibay/>  [X] ballibay<https://twitter.com/ballibay>
Associate Professor, Sound & Emerging Media, Brooklyn College
Founder, M.F.A. program in Performance & Interactive Media Arts (PIMA)
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