alice-teacher Alice announcements!

[Melanie Lam]

Hi teachers,

I hope your school year is off to a good start.  I want to share with you,
our dedicated teacher community before these updates hit our Twitter feed
@AliceProjectCMU <https://twitter.com/AliceProjectCMU>.

******* New Alice 3.7 Update! *******

Alice 3.7 is finally here!  Along with the Alice IDE, there is a compatible
Netbeans Plugin and new Alice Player beta 19.  Notes on the features and
bug fixes are available on the website but I'd like to highlight a few here:

1) Bug fixes for shapes (eg. cubes, prisms) and custom images on shapes +
webp textures. Here is a cube template image
<http://www.alice.org/resources/how-tos/map-custom-images/> that will help
students map exactly how they want their cube to look. We'll be making more
templates like that available soon.

2) Scene setup: better Side/Front/Top Scene views and the ability to center
on an object in the scene from those views.

3) Improvements to Alice Player as a standalone app (Mac/PC/VR) that makes
it easy to present all your students' work in one place.

4) Bug fixes on Alice Player to make The Sims models and Vehicles models
work.

5) Alice 3.7 fully translated in simplified Chinese!


****** Alice Projects on Meta Quest VR ******

You can now export Alice worlds from almost any computer to run on Quest VR.

Get the Alice Player Quest APK
<http://www.alice.org/get-alice/alice-3-player/> for Quest VR headsets.
Students don't need Meta accounts but teachers or IT will in order to
configure the headsets. There are training videos
<https://youtu.be/5Ssg-YijAT4> on how to set it up for Alice.  No student
data is gathered or shared.


****** M1 Macs Workaround ******

We have a workaround for Alice 2.5 launch issues on M1 silicon Macs.  The
solution is to first install and run Alice 3.7 (or any other Intel-based
app), when prompted, choose to install Rosetta 2, then re-launch Alice 2.5.
M1 Macs require Rosetta 2, an interpreter for Intel-based apps and Alice
2.5 sometimes fails to prompt the user to install Rosetta 2.

Another option is to force Rosetta 2 to install in the Terminal App:

   -

   /usr/sbin/softwareupdate --install-rosetta


*****

Thank you to many of you for taking the time to report your findings and
provide us with valuable troubleshooting information. Do you have Alice
curriculum to share? Feedback or request for a topic?  Let us know.

We would love to bring an Alice or Alice VR workshop to your school or
district. Reach out to me directly at melanielam at cmu.edu.

best,
Melanie
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