alice-teacher Alice Team Updates and Calls to Action

[Eric Brown]

Dear All,

I hope this finds everyone off to a great start to the school year.  I wanted to post several updates and make a couple community requests.  It has been a while so there a bunch of items but please take a second to read through * mark the most import community requests.

1.  Alice Challenge Updates - We have posted all of our template materials from our inaugural event that can be used as a blueprint for anyone wanting to host a challenge (https://www.alice.org/alicechallenge/).  We are also here to help anyone who wants to try to host one in another region.  We will be hosting another challenge in Pittsburgh area this year so please check back as we update training opportunities and dates around the challenge.

* We have an amazing high school student who wants to run an Alice challenge in the LA area.  She is in Ventura County where she got a grant and ran a summer camp for girls (https://www.theacorn.com/articles/these-are-the-girls-who-code/).  If anyone on this list is in the LA area and would like to help her or would want to broaden her initiative to other districts please contact us.  I would love to help her in any way we can.

2.  Curriculum Materials - We have added and updated a bunch of lessons for Alice 3.  Definitely take a look and see if there is anything new that would be useful to you or your students.  If you are already using these you may want to check to see if new version have been posted. (https://www.alice.org/resources/alice-3-lessons/).  

*As always we are eager to hear from you if you are using these materials with any comments, suggestions, or with assessment or exercise materials you have paired with them so that we can share them out with the community.  Please contact us if you want to share feedback or help us review and expand the materials.

3.  Technical Development - We had hoped to release a new version of Alice in time for the new school year however our release has been delayed due to our desire to finally release the model import pipeline.  This development is approaching completion but will need significant QA.  We do plan to release it in Beta this fall.  We have also gained a lot of momentum towards our external Alice player to allow sharing of worlds outside of the Alice IDE.  This is also our first step towards us publishing to VR/AR.  We have engaged Filament Games to help accelerate our work and they have been great to work with.  More to come soon,

* If you would be interested in beta testing a model import version of Alice with a 3D modeling class please reach out to us.

As always we are grateful for your support and appreciate all of your support for each other.  We continue to try to improve your experience with Alice.  Your feedback is what helps us do that so don’t be shy.

Sincerely,

Eric