Students at DaVinci use new interactive 'Alice' software

I'm not much of a crier.

Still, I got a little teary this summer watching Diane Sawyer's coverage of Carnegie Mellon professor Randy Pausch's final days.

The Pittsburgh computer scientist and 47-year-old father of three bravely fought pancreatic cancer - living each day, until the very end, to the fullest.

Pausch's lasting legacy was to teach. Both through his highly acclaimed "Last Lecture" book, and through one of his last projects, a computer programming teaching tool called Alice.

Alice is used by students at high schools and colleges throughout the country. It is also now being used by DaVinci Academy middle school students in Elgin.

According to the teaching tool's Web site, in Alice, students find three-dimensional people, animals and vehicles in a virtual world, and are tasked with making a computer program that animates those objects.

In Alice's interactive interface, "students drag and drop graphic tiles to create a program, where the instructions correspond to standard statements in a production oriented programming language, such as Java, C++, and C#. Alice allows students to immediately see how their animation programs run, enabling them to easily understand the relationship between the programming statements and the behavior of objects in their animation."

It will be exciting to watch DaVinci's students in the next few months, as they, like Pausch, grow as storytellers.

Keeping schools safe: The Village of Streamwood and Elgin Area School District U-46 received a joint $473,000 "Secure our Schools" grant aimed at improving school safety.

Streamwood Police plan to use funds to install a camera system at Streamwood High School; for digital radios which allow police and fire departments to communicate with the village's 10 schools; for laptops used by school liaison officers; and for a visitor check in and screening system and the replacement of interior door locks.

Streamwood is one of 12 cities in the state to get the grant.

When it rains, it pours: Not exactly school news, but a must-read for waterlogged community members.

The Gail Borden library has added books and pamphlets to their collection for homeowners dealing with wet basements and moisture problems. There's also a special section on its Web site.