Tribute To Randy Pausch

[Ton van Overbeek]

Eben Eliason wrote:
> I had the opportunity to study under Randy during his last year at the
> Entertainment Technology Center, before Jesse (formerly of Disney
> Imagineering) took over.  His Building Virtual Worlds course was the
> most time consuming yet most rewarding educational experience I've
> ever had.  He was an amazing teacher, as well as a fun-loving and
> charismatic person.  He will surely be missed.
>
> I haven't personally experimented with Alice, but I have seen it in
> action and it looks like a pretty valuable tool for those just
> learning to think like a programmer, without the need to overcome the
> syntax hurdle.  However, it's also a fairly dense UI (lots of stuff on
> screen), so there may be some issues making everything legible on our
> smaller screens.  I'm also not sure how well the XO will handle the
> real-time 3D rendering, but some experimentation with this would be
> welcome.
>
> - Eben
>
>
> On Fri, Aug 15, 2008 at 9:31 AM, Greg Smith <gregsmitholpc at gmail.com> wrote:
>   
>> Hi All,
>>
>> I'd like to take a moment to respectfully mark the passing of Randy Pausch.
>>
>> I wasn't aware of him before he died but it looks like his work
>> (http://download.srv.cs.cmu.edu/~pausch/Randy/oldRandyPage.html) was
>> very relevant for our project. It seems like he was one of "us" (not
>> that I'm of the same caliber).
>>
>> Has anyone used Alice: http://www.alice.org/ and is it something we
>> should consider for the XO?
>>
>> I like his focus on entertainment and fun in the educational process. I
>> think the XO would benefit from more excitement and pizazz in our
>> activities.
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> Greg S
>>     
I did not know about Alice until I read Greg's announcement.
Poked a little bit around on the Alice site.
The whole thing is implemented in java with some JNI (Java Native 
Interface) for rendering using hardware
accelerated 3D (requires GL).
It seems to me the XO-1 hardware is not powerful enough for Alice.
It would need a complete rewrite of the lower levels to bring it down
to what the XO can handle.
But I sure would like to see Alice on the XO ...
Something for the next Google Summer of Code ?

Ton van Overbeek