Last year I read a book called The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch. Randy was a teacher at Carnegie Mellon University who was dying of cancer. In addition to being a very inspiring book, I discovered a program called Alice as a result of my reading. Alice teaches students computer programming in a 3 D environment. Since then I have downloaded the free version of Alice and installed it in our high school computer lab. Alice is remarkably friendly program with built in tutorials. If you have not used Alice, stop in the computer lab and try out the tutorials, and if you want your own version to use at home, go to the Alice website at http://www.alice.org/. Sadly Randy Pausch died in 2008, but he has left the world an inspiring book and a wonderful way to learn computer programming.
