On Fri, Jan 9, 2009 at 3:48 PM, Steven Black <
blacks@indiana.edu> wrote:
> You should've tried a hex editor on the saved games! That's how I
> started.
Perhaps; too late, now!
> Who needs god mode when you can quickly and easily both increase
> your own hit points, and decrease the hitpoints of particularly hard
> monsters. (Though that came much later, it was fairly easy to change the
> PC's stats, including literally maxing out the money.)
Who needs the ability to change things outside the game when you can
do it in real-time while you're playing? ;-)
Now, Re: Alice.
The more I've gotten into Alice, the more frustrating it has been for me.
It was fun while I was just working on presenting a scene from Alice's
Adventures in Wonderland; they have 3-d models for all the characters,
and the language is named after the story (the red queen glares at you
angrily when the program hits a bug, f'r'instance), so I figured it'd
be both easy(ish) and appropriate. I'm still not done with that,
little tweaks here and there, but I decided to run Alice through some
more CSy paces.
However, I've found it not worthwhile for anything non-trivial. I've
*YET* to get Conway's Game of Life working, and I'm certain that it is
Alice's failure and not my own (I've proven it; in one method getting
the "i"th item out of a list of booleans comes out "true" or "false",
in the method I originally wrote, it always comes out "None").
I will beat my head on this until I get it to work or until I get to
the point where I know nothing else to try, though, since I *am*
rather pig-headed.
For one thing the interface is incredibly clunky; I needed 100
penguins for a 10x10 Game of Life, but I couldn't instantiate 100
penguins by declaring an array of 100 penguin class objects; I had to
manually drag and drop 100 Penguin objects into the world (each of
which has it's own, independent class from the other 99 penguins), and
then MANUALLY put them each, one by one, into a list variable so I
could programatically move them to their starting positions when I
click "Play".
Also it's got all kinds of bugs and quirks (different ones between
Windows and Linux, though some are the same), and CMU hasn't patched
the official version (2.0) since April of 2005.
It's ostensibly open source (that is, you can get the source code; the
other resources are copyrighted, I believe), but they don't accept
anyone else's input.
There *is* a 2.2 beta but they don't encourage it's use, and there
*is* a 3.0 being worked on, but I have a hard time believing 3.0 will
be any more open, since they're heavily depending on intellectual
property from EA's "The Sims 2".
All in all, so far I feel like "Wow, this *could be* really cool if it
had an open community behind it, but I guess it's okay enough for
Middle Schoolers making 3-d cartoons, as it is."
I understand it's aimed at college level CS courses, but I can't
really imagine it being appropriate for any but the most basic
introduction, as it is.
> Yeah, the rest of the world thinks of using it no earlier than middle
> school. I think, "Hey, that may be an introduction suitable to age 5 or
> 6."
Totally. 8th graders jump in with absolutely no problem. I don't know
about *ANY* 5 or 6 year old, but I would have had a blast with this
when I was 6.
> After all, I was already planning to teach her Python at age 8. If this
> one is supposed to be easier to use, then it logically would be suitable
> for earlier ages...
*I THINK* it would be suitable for earlier ages (5ish) if: the person
teaching it understands it and knows the learner well enough to
explain it for them, and the kid learning already has a firm grasp of
using a mouse with a GUI and a healthy curiosity. Key here is: IF the
kid is interested.
We use Scratch in our Lower School programming classes, FWIW; it's got
a similar drag-and-drop interface, but it's based on Squeak and
interacts primarily with 2-D graphics (but it can also be used to
program Lego robots...).
> Cheers,
> Steven
Cheers!
Simón
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