alice-teacher Finch + Alice

[Tom Lauwers]

Hello,

With the blessing of Don and Wanda, we have created Finch Dreams, a
program for controlling the Finch robot, based heavily on Alice 2.2.
Finch Dreams lets you do everything you can do with Alice 2.2, and
adds support for the Finch, a robot designed at CMU for CS education.
The Finch is a $99 USB-tethered and powered robot with light sensors,
obstacle sensors, a temperature sensor, and a 3-axis accelerometer; it
was initially designed for introductory CS education at the high
school and college level and has support for Java, Python, VB, C++,
Scala, Processing, Matlab, and soon Logo and Javascript.

With Finch Dreams you can write programs that control the Finch and
also that use the Finch's sensors to control animations in Finch
Dreams (an example program in Finch Dreams uses the Finch's
accelerometer to control a bowling ball, sort of like a Wii-mote,
another uses the Finch's light sensors to control the amount of light
in the scene).

We currently have a stable version working under Windows, and will
shortly be launching a beta version for the Mac. You can download and
run it (even without a Finch) at:
http://www.finchrobot.com/downloads#finchdreams

You can also check out the tutorial at:
http://www.finchrobot.com/Creating%2C%20Compiling%2C%20and%20Running%20Programs%20for%20Finch/finch-dreams-tutorial

I would strongly recommend checking out the second video tutorial to
see more about how you can control objects in Alice with Finch:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o28PhEXHGik

We're very excited about Finch Dreams - in addition to making the
Finch programmable by 6th-8th graders, we also think that it adds
compelling functionality to Alice to be able to use a physical device
to interact with the animations and worlds created by students.

Tom Lauwers
Chief Roboticist, BirdBrain Technologies LLC