AMMAN, Jordan, 24 February 2014 -- Alice 3, a version of the popular software tool that introduces young students to computer programming, is now available in Arabic following a translation project involving students from universities across Jordan.

The translation project, which took four months to complete, was managed by the Oracle Academy and Carnegie Mellon University. Students who took part in the project were awarded with a certificate of participation at the launch event in Amman, Jordan.

Alice is a free platform from Carnegie Mellon University designed to teach students object-oriented programming by engaging them in a fun activity -- making animated movies and games. Using Alice, students create programs to animate 3-D objects that populate a virtual world by dragging and dropping graphic tiles that contain standard Java programming statements. By running their programs, they learn the relationship between the programming statements and the behaviour of objects in their animations. This enables them to gain experience with constructs typically addressed in introductory programming courses.

Alice software tools are downloaded more than a million times per year.
“Alice has been running successfully in the Middle East for many years, but we were conscious that we could reach more students if the program were in a language with which students were more familiar,” said Jane Richardson, EMEA Director of the Oracle Academy. “We were delighted when Carnegie Mellon University - the creators of Alice - gave us an opportunity to approach universities in the country to enlist the help of student volunteers to drive the translation process.”
Alice can be downloaded free of charge at www.alice.org and many countries have included Alice in their IT curriculum for schools. “Alice is designed to be used by any student who has access to a computer and the Internet,” continued Richardson. “In addition to schools, the program is used by computer clubs who meet at various venues in the community. The feedback we received from countries such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and UAE led us to seek partners to create an Arabic version.”

Oracle Academy offers professional training to educators in one-day Alice workshops or as part of the Java Fundamentals training, available via the Oracle Academy Introduction to Computer Science Program.

Oracle Academy has created a series of Open Educational Resources for use by educators and students and an online self-study version of the Oracle Academy Alice curriculum is available on the website
https://academy.oracle.com/self-study/alice/index.html

“We were pleased to collaborate with the students at Hashemite University, Jordan University of Science and Technology, Princess Sumaya University for Technology, and Philadelphia University, their advisors, and the Oracle Academy,” said Wanda Dann, Director of the Alice Project at Carnegie Mellon University. “Their contribution is invaluable in creating Alice 3 in Arabic.”

About Oracle Academy
http://oracle.com/academy

About Carnegie Mellon University
www.cmu.edu