alice-teacher Garfield comes to Alice 2!

[Don Slater]

Two times a year we release a major update of the Alice 2 software package with gallery updates, feature modifications, and bug fixes. We use this twice a year schedule so that schools are able to update the software on their systems (if they choose), between semesters. We are very excited to announce that students can now create animations of Garfield the Cat with this latest version of Alice 2 (Alice 2.4).

Wanda Dann, director of the Alice Project, said this new release of Alice features Garfield, Odie, Jon, Nermel and other characters from the popular comic strip. She notes the latest release is geared to appeal to middle and high school students as teachers are increasingly requesting educational materials for computer science that are appropriate for that age group.

Permission to add the Garfield characters to Alice was provided to the Alice developers through an agreement with Paws Inc., the company founded by cartoonist Jim Davis that manages the corpulent kitty's creative and business concerns. Garfield & Friends, created by Davis in 1978, appears in more than 2,100 newspapers worldwide and is read daily by 200 million people.

"Alice is used in classrooms around the globe, so we appreciate the influence an internationally recognized character such as Garfield has on school children," Dann said. "It says a lot about Jim Davis and Paws Inc. that they are willing to share these beloved and valuable characters with Alice. It means they really care about children and their education.”

A video of Garfield and Odie (above) created with Alice 2.4 is available on YouTube at

	http://youtu.be/oqYAs1e1dD4.

 A one-hour introductory exercise featuring Alice 2.4 has been developed for the Hour of Code, a project during Computer Science Education Week, Dec. 9-15, and available at 

	http://code.org/.

For more information about Alice and Garfield, see http://www.cmu.edu/news/stories/archives/2013/december/dec3_aliceandgarfield.html

To download the latest version of the Alice 2 software, go to http://www.alice.org/index.php?page=downloads/download_alice2.4

As well as adding the Garfield characters to the Alice 2 Gallery, there have been other feature modifications and a significant number of bug fixes. See the following link for the release notes of Alice 2.4.

	http://help.alice.org/w/page/58024878/Alice%202%20Release%20Notes

All the best,
Don Slater