Randy Pausch 1960-2008

RIP Randy Pausch, CS professor at CMU who achieved his childhood dreams and delivered a poignant "Last Lecture" when he was diagnosed with terminal cancer.

His main legacy is Alice, a free software tool that pretends to teach kids how to tell stories in 3D graphics, but really teaches them serious programming. Programming, in the words of Don Slater from the Alice promotional video, is telling the machine in front of you how to do what you need it to do. But instead of focusing on the minutia of a programming language syntax, it gives students the ability to easily create and animate 3D virtual inhabited worlds. The characters are objects with members and methods, and the environment supports variables, loops, conditionals, recursion, -- most things necessary for a thorough introduction to programming, which can be done entirely through a drag-and-drop interface where no mistakes can be made.

The trick is that the students' attention gets engaged from day one with a storytelling/world-building experience and without the frustration of compiler errors and segmentation faults. The Alice team cite statistics for at-risk students getting better grades and a lower drop-out rate in computer science. "At-risk" of course means students who don't fit the traditional CS mold, precisely the students CS departments would like to recruit and keep in the name of diversity, creativity, and a richer talent pool.

Basically, Alice is like an all-virtual Lego MindStorms on crack. For some reason, I think this sort of inappropriate language for an obit (which this isn't) would be appreciated by the late Prof. Pausch. Alice takes to university level what the Lego programming interface gave to younger kids: the same wonderment at just having created something with your own drag-and-dropping hands, at at watching it do its stuff. This is how many an engineer gets her calling.

Randy Pausch and the Alice team say: look, kiddo, you can take these abstract things and stack them any which way, and depending on how you do it, your machine will make you a world full of action and character, joy and meaning. This is so close to magic. And by the way, you have now learned Java. I wish I was learning to program all over again.

The Boston Phoenix weighs in on the eternal question

Will robots take over the world?
There's endless speculation, and I promise to post some links and actual commentary shortly, but meanwhile, I'm a little late in on this: http://thephoenix.com//Boston/Life/61912-Rage-against-the-machines/ (published May 28, 2008), where I sound like a total ass.