Programming in Alice

Your second computer adventure in CISC 1100 will be learning a bit about programming, using the Alice programming environment. Since our computer labs are Linux-based, it would make sense for you to use a Linux version.

Unfortunately, some people have reported bugs when trying to run some of the Alice tutorials under Linux (more precisely, parts 3 and 4 of the tutorial). Should this happen to you, the (more or less) good news here is:

• The Windows version of Alice seems to be more stable than the Linux version.
• Our labs are set up so that you can run Windows as a "guest operating system" under Linux, using Oracle Software's VirtualBox program.

So we're offering two versions of the Alice project:

1. A Linux version.
2. A Windows version.

Most of the material in these two versions is the same. The main difference is that the Windows version tells you how to work with a virtualized Windows system that's running as a guest operating system under VirtualBox.

Another possibility is for you to do the work on your own computer. If you go to the Alice website, you can download Alice for Mac, Windows, or Linux. Make sure that you're downloading version 2 of Alice, rather than version 3! The only downside here (and it's pretty slight) is that at some point, you'll need to upload Alice worlds that you have created, so that I can see them. (In fact, you'll need to do something similar if you're using virtualized Windows in the lab.)