Alice (software)
Alice is an object-based educational programming language with an integrated development environment (IDE). Alice uses a drag and drop environment to create computer animations using 3D models. The software was developed first at University of Virginia in 1994, then Carnegie Mellon (from 1997), by a research group led by Randy Pausch. Origin of name. According to Randy Pausch, the name “Alice” comes from author Lewis Carroll, who wrote Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. "Carroll was a mathematician, novelist, and photographer. Most important, he could do intellectually difficult things but also realized the most powerful thing was to  be able to communicate clearly and in an entertaining way. This inspires our efforts to make something as complex as computer programming easy and fun." Purpose. Alice was developed to address four core problems in educational programming: Alice 3 is released under an open-source license allowing redistribution of the source code, with or without modification. Research. In controlled studies at Ithaca College and Saint Joseph's University looking at students with no prior programming experience taking their first computer science course, the average grade rose from C to B, and retention rose from 47% to 88%, exceeding even the  75% retention rate of students with prior programming experience. In a second study at Carnegie Mellon University, students taking their first computer science course with a mediated transfer approach that transitioned from Alice 3 to Java scored an average of 84.96% and 81.52% in two semesters of testing this approach, compared to an average of 60.8% before the mediated transfer approach. Variant. A variant of Alice 2.0 called Storytelling Alice was created by Caitlin Kelleher for her PhD dissertation. It includes three main differences: In a study performed on middle-school girls in the United States, Storytelling Alice appeared to  increase interest compared to generic Alice, with a 42% increase in programming time, with students three times as likely to do additional work on their projects, with no reduction in basic programming concepts learned. Storytelling Alice was succeeded by the interactive storytelling application Looking Glass, developed at Washington University in St. Louis.