Tribute To Randy Pausch

[Noah Kantrowitz]

Ton van Overbeek wrote:
> 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 ?

I'm pretty sure Squeak, which eToys is based on, has Alice support built-in.

--Noah

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