1. Discovery

Our current story from Module 1 isn't bad, but we can imagine making it even more realistic. In general, making things more realistic in Alice will mean making them more complex -- involving more instructions and more complex control of those instructions -- for example, with Do together and Do in order tiles. In general, getting really realistic "animations" isn't a goal in this course. But in this case, we want you to see something more realistic to understand why computing people need tools to help organize and manage complexity.

Let's enhance our story from the previous module. Here's an overview of how we should enhance it:

• • After the beetle "jumps out", he rears up and says to slackerProm "Pet me!"

  • As ringoBeetle moves out from behind the tree, he "steps" with his left leg.

  • After ringoBeetle steps out, he turns to face slackerProm and sort of drops his head (in shame?) down and up, before he apologizes to slackerProm.

This both adds a lot of instructions and adds some new complexity by having subparts of objects move (as described in Sections 1.11 and 1.12) -- up to now, we have only controlled complete objects.

First, have a look at the new, more realistic animation. You should play this video several times trying to match up what you are seeing with what you expect to happen -- specifically look for the points where the three bulleted changes above happen:

Extended Beetle Video

Lesson Learned: Computing people observe program behavior and try to match it up in their head to their plan or their program.

If you have trouble -- write out the complete plan for our new world, starting with the plan here and modifying it with our described changes in the above bullet points (note: this is our old plan, before we had our Do together behavior).

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