csinger
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Posted: February 26, 2009 22:03 by csinger
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I Googled for JRuby and came across Alice during my wandering. What a pleasant surprise! I wish Alice was around when I was in CS @ Pitt (I moved to SLIS b/c I wasn't diggin' the CS curriculum). Anyway, I see why Alice is such a great teaching tool. What about using Alice as a tool to develop real-world applications? Has (is) anyone built (building) an application that does something beyond story-telling? One potential application that immediately leaps to mind is what's called "virtual patient" which is a way to teach medical students how to treat patients for specific medical conditions. There are lots of ways that virtual patient "applications" are built. One such way involves what's known as the MedBiquitous Virtual Patient XML which is a XML format and "player" framework for running VP applications. Here's a link to a wiki for those that may be interested in learning more: http://groups.medbiq.org/medbiq/display/VPWG/Charter Most of what I've seen in terms of sample VP applications are HTML-based -perhaps w/ some video thrown-in. This is far from interesting for a learner if you ask me. What would be really cool is to use Alice to create a virtual world where a doctor can have an encounter with a patient and work through a diagnosis and treatment. Behind the scenes, teh Alice app. uses the MedBiq VP framework to track what the learner has done and direct the learned based on their responses. I think that if there were much more compelling content, that would really drive the learner's interest and help them become great doctors in the future. What do yunz (I'm from Pittsburgh) think? |
Using Alice for Real-World Development?
3 posts
Replies: 2 - Last Post: March 11, 2009 19:55
by: csinger
by: csinger
showing 1 - 3 of 3
DanGJavaGeek
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Posted: March 04, 2009 17:32 by DanGJavaGeek
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As it stands, Alice is a teaching tool but with no direct virtual world hosting option which might support, for instance, a virtual patients environment usable by both students and teachers. That having been said, keep an eye out for Alice 3 which will have an option to export Alice projects out to Java code. From there, a Java application, say "virtual patient" built in Alice, could be run and hosted on any application server. Best regards, -- DanG |
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csinger
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Posted: March 11, 2009 19:55 by csinger
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I love the way that folks learn programming via the "fill-in-the-blank" method. Can the Alice environment be programmed to include other languages such as C# or PHP or Ruby or {your favorite here} language? Much like there is "intellisense" in tools like Visual Studio, it would be cool if there was a way to create "templates" for various constructs in a given language and then when someone drags/drops a FOR loop for a language, for example, the appropriate drop-downs appear and the user fills-in the blanks. I can't wait to see V3. It's a great learning tool that has potential to go beyond mere learning! |
Replies: 2 - Last Post: March 11, 2009 19:55
by: csinger
by: csinger
