Carnegie Mellon and Sun Microsystems Collaborate To Support
Continued Development of Alice Programming Environment

PITTSBURGH— Sun Microsystems, Inc., is teaming up with Carnegie Mellon
University to support the continuing development of Alice, the university’s
innovative, Java technology-based computer programming environment that
teaches students to program Java software while having fun creating 3D
animations, stories and video games.

Alice is an object-oriented, open source system developed over the last 10
years that is provided free to educators and students by the university. It
features a drag and drop interface that allows students to create 3D
environments and populate them with a wide variety of easy to program
objects and characters. Because it’s based on open development principles,
it encourages users and teachers to share knowledge to improve teaching
methods and identify improvements to the software on which the system is
based.

Alice was the key research project of Randy Pausch, Carnegie Mellon’s
beloved professor of computer science, human-computer interaction and  design
who died of pancreatic cancer last summer at the age of 47. Pausch spent
more than a decade of his career developing the program. He was able  to see
a rough version of a new, enhanced Alice 3 just before he died.

Over the next three years, Sun Microsystems will work with Carnegie Mellon
to globalize Alice, providing the tools to translate it into different
languages and develop drag and drop artifacts unique to a variety of
cultures. Sun will work with the Alice development team to bring the  system
to a worldwide audience of educators and students.

contributions to computer science education," said Carnegie Mellon  alumnus
James Gosling, vice president and Sun Fellow who created the Java language.
"There’s no better investment we can make than in the education of the  next
generation. I’m thrilled that we’re making this commitment.”

Today, it’s estimated that the current version — Alice- 2.0 — is being used
in 10 to 15 percent of U.S. colleges and universities, as well as a  number
of high schools and middle schools. There is a version called  "Storytelling
Alice" that is especially attractive to middle school girls, helping  them to
become aware of the importance of computer science early in their
educational careers.

A team of researchers headed by Associate Teaching Professor
Wanda P. Dann and lead developer and Project Scientist Dennis Cosgrove  is
working around the clock to bring out Alice 3. Dann said that the  support of
Sun will enable her group to debug and extend their rough version of the
system, increase the size of their team, speed up the development  process
and produce a higher quality product.

 "Sun’s participation will provide our team with the  technical
resources we need to bring the development of Alice 3 to completion over the
next three years," Dann said. "We will bring out a full release of  Alice 3
and follow that with the development of application programming  interfaces
that will make it useful in all STEM disciplines, including computer
science." Dann said that Alice 3 also will make it easier for teachers  using
Alice to move their students into Java software.

Alice 3 also will feature essential arts assets from a  version
of "The Sims™" — one of the best selling PC video games of all time —  which
were given as a gift to the research team in 2006. The Sims content  helps to
transform the Alice software from a crude, 3-D programming tool into a
compelling and user-friendly programming environment.

"Alice 3 is a major advance over the 2.0 version" said Peter
Lee, professor and head of the Computer Science Department in Carnegie
Mellon’s School of Computer Science. "It retains the attractive,  intuitive
interface that motivates students to write computer programs almost without
knowing it. At the same time, it provides a pathway to learning
industrial-strength Java software programming. For many, this will be a
great ticket to upward mobility."

The Alice Project has been supported in the past by the  National
Science Foundation, DARPA, Intel, Microsoft and SAIC, as well as  Electronic
Arts, Google, General Dynamics, the Heinz Foundation and the Hearst
Foundation. For more information about the Alice project, see
http://www.alice.org. Carnegie Mellon makes downloads of the Alice  software
available at no cost at www.alice.org <http://www.alice.org> .