Alice Book

340 Pages·2011·9.62 MB·English

Alice 3 Cookbook
79 recipes to harness the power of Alice 3 for teaching
students to build attractive and interactive 3D scenes
and videos
Vanesa S. Olsen
BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI
Alice 3 Cookbook
Copyright © 2011 Packt Publishing
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First published: April 2011
Production Reference: 1180411
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.
32 Lincoln Road
Olton
Birmingham, B27 6PA, UK.
ISBN 978-1-849514-92-7
www.packtpub.com
Cover Image by Ed Maclean ([email protected])
Credits
Author Project Coordinator
Vanesa S. Olsen Shubhanjan Chatterjee
Reviewers Proofreader
Don Davis Samantha Lyon
Els van Tol - Homan
Indexer
Acquisition Editor
Tejal Daruwale
Sarah Cullington
Production Coordinator
Development Editor
Aparna Bhagat
Chris Rodrigues
Cover Work
Technical Editors
Aparna Bhagat
Gauri Iyer
Prashant Macha
About the Author
Vanesa S. Olsen is a Speech Therapist. She has been working for more than six years in
therapeutic centers, schools, and hospitals. She has been applying modern technologies in
language disorders and learning disabilities treatments, and in helping schools to keep the
students in the least restrictive environment. Specifically, she has been working with Alice
3, Moodle as an e-Learning platform, and other tools. She combined this software with the
usage of Web 2.0 and general purpose modern hardware as gamepads, pen sketches, touch
screens, netbooks, tablets, smartphones, and joysticks. She enjoys helping children and
teenagers to improve their skills.
She has written another book for Packt Publishing, Moodle 1.9 for Teaching Special Education
Children (5-10): Beginner’s Guide.
She lives with her husband, Gaston, and his little son, Kevin. When she is not working,
she devotes her spare time to her family and hobbies. She enjoys modeling in cold
porcelain, swimming, and researching about new technologies and techniques to apply
in her treatments.
You can contact her at [email protected] and also at [email protected].
Acknowledgement
While writing this book, I was fortunate enough to work with an excellent team at Packt
Publishing Ltd, whose contributions vastly improved the presentation of this book. Sarah
Cullington helped me to transform the idea in the final book and to shape this Cookbook.
Shubhanjan Chatterjee helped me to follow an organized schedule. Chris Rodrigues provided
many sensible suggestions regarding the text, the format, and the flow. The reader will notice
his great work. Prashant Macha and Gauri Iyer made sure that all the recipes were accurate
and added great value to the final drafts.

I would like to thank my reviewers, Don Davis and Els van Tol, for their thorough reviews and
insightful comments. I was able to incorporate some of the knowledge and wisdom they have
gained in their many years of experience with Alice in the classroom. The recipes and the
pictures include their great feedback.

Special thanks go to my husband, Gaston Hillar, who suggested me to use new technologies
in therapeutic environments a few years ago and motivated me to work on this new project.
Moreover, I would like to thank my sister-in-law, Silvina Hillar, who also helped with her
teaching expertise, my son Kevin and my nephew Nicolas, who enrich my life with their affect,
my friends, and my fathers-in-law.
About the Reviewers
Don Davis has taught Alice in the classroom and discussed its use as a cognitive tool at
state and international conferences. He is dedicated to researching and advocating the use
of Free and Open Source Software in education. In his free time, he works to assist the Helios
Project and reglue.org in providing refurbished GNU/Linux computers to students in need.
I would like to thank Carnegie Mellon University for making Alice 3 available
for GNU/Linux.

Els van Tol–Homan: is working as an informatics teacher in a High School (College
Hageveld) at Heemstede/Netherlands. He has experience in teaching the following
subjects: Hardware, Data communication, Programming (PHP, C++, Java, Alice, NXT), Project
management, UML, and so on.
During the 15 years of his experience, he worked as a senior software engineer and developer
in Research and Development areas for different institutes. He developed low-level software
(such as device drivers) and high-level software (GUIs) for automation of science projects
at different institutes, such as ESRF (European Synchrotron Facility), European Molecular
Biology Laboratory, and the University of Leiden.
Currently, he is working on a Dutch book about Alice 3.0 & Java.
Technical skills/experience: Java (J2SE, Java SE, J2EE, Java EE), JavaScript, SQL, PHP, XML,
C, C++, Haskell, Python, Ruby, Open wonderland, Alice, OpenGL, 3D programming.
OS: MS Windows 9x/XP/NT,7, Linux
Databases: Oracle, MySQL
Web: J2EE, Java Security, JSP/Servlets, Java Applets, DHTML, JavaScript, CSS, PHP, Perl, XML,
CGI, Apache, Zope
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I would like to dedicate this book to my son Kevin and my husband Gaston