Carnegie Mellon University
April 22, 2013

News Brief: Oracle and Curriki Release Curriculum for Alice

AliceThe Oracle Academy, an educational initiative of Oracle, and Curriki, a nonprofit, global community for sharing educational resources, are working to make a curriculum for Carnegie Mellon University's Alice software widely available to secondary school teachers and students.

The Oracle Academy curriculum, "Getting Started with Java Using Alice," engages students with little or no programming experience to learn basic concepts of Java, one of the world's most popular computing platforms.

"Oracle works to advance education with state-of-the-art technology programs that awaken and deepen students' interest in computer science and engineering," said Alison Derbenwick Miller, vice president of the Oracle Academy. "Our 'Getting Started with Java Using Alice' curriculum is designed to help students explore the power of computer programming. By collaborating with Curriki, we hope to deliver this introductory Java course to hundreds of thousands of teachers and students worldwide."

Alice educational software, which Carnegie Mellon makes available as a free download, teaches students about object-oriented programming by enabling novices to make 3-D animated movies and games using a drag-and-drop interface. Students can run their programs immediately to see the relationship between programming statements and the behavior of the objects in their animations. Oracle is among the financial supporters of the Alice Project, www.alice.org.

"In classrooms around the world, Alice software has engaged students in computer programming, demonstrating that it can be creative and fun," said Wanda Dann, director of the Alice Project and senior systems scientist in the Computer Science Department. "We are excited that this learning experience will be expanded to far more students, thanks to the efforts of the Oracle Academy and Curriki."