After I worked up enough nerve to attempt an animation, I found it to be kind of fun. I know there is much more to Alice than what I used to create my video, but it was a start. When I ran into trouble, I went to the forum on the Alice website. I found some answers to my questions there. I think if I had posted my questions I probably would have gotten a helpful response. I also found some helpful tutorials on YouTube as well as some examples of how people were using Alice. While I'm far from an expert, I think I could help my students get started making an animation in Alice and could help them find assistance if they run into trouble.
I used Alice to make a short movie about the Causes of World War I. However, when reading the forums and watching YouTube, I realized many people use Alice to make classroom games. Making a game would involve using the variables that I used sparingly in my video. It seems math teachers have students use Alice to have students demonstrate logic and reasoning skills.
My main struggle with Alice was exporting the video. There was not a Mac version of one of the downloads I needed to export on the Mac from Alice 2.2. I transferred the file and tried to download on my Windows laptop. I couldn't get the video to download on the laptop even after I downloaded all 3 Java programs. The program kept telling me "Movie Export is not enabled." The laptop was running Alice 2.0 and I don't think the export works even with the downloads.
Overall, I was pretty proud of my final Alice product. I even showed it to my 3 year old son. He watched the video on the computer and then said, "you know, Mommy, there are some pretty good kid videos on that computer. You want me to show you?" I guess I've gotta work harder. Maybe I can make a video like this:
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