UAB Alice Film Festival

The UAB Alice Film Festival provides an opportunity for Alabama K-12 students to create video games and animated movies using Alice and submit them to a competition. Movies and video games from the film festival are shown at a special event and awards are given in several categories. The film festival will take place on Saturday May 16, 2009 from 1:00pm-4:45pm at Campbell Hall (Room 405) on the UAB campus.

Related Event: The UAB High School Programming Contest (HSPC) brings talented students from high schools throughout Alabama to the UAB campus to participate in an organized competition. Students individually compete to demonstrate their programming skills and problem solving abilities by attempting to solve six programming problems within a three hour period. Schools that have more than three contestants are also eligible for team awards. More information about the HSPC is available here.

Related Event: The CIS Department offers the UAB Summer Computer Camps - a 4-week series of summer camps for high school and middle school students. If you are interested in the camps, more information is available here.

Invitation: If you are interested in attending the event as an observer (not as a formal participant), please express your interest by sending an email to gray@cis.uab.edu.

General Information

What is Alice?

• Alice is an interactive 3D-programming environment from Carnegie-Mellon University. The goal of Alice is to offer the best possible first exposure to programming for students by providing a more intuitive environment for teaching object-oriented programming. Throughout the United States, several universities are using Alice to introduce computer programming to middle school and high school students.

• Alice has been shown to help motivate an interest in computing among both girls and boys. Many approaches toward teaching computer programming are not appealing to young girls, but research has demonstrated that Alice offers benefits toward attracting girls into computing.

• Alice is freely available for download at http://www.alice.org

Overview

• All students in Alabama public, private, and home schools are invited to participate.

• To prepare for the contest, students independently create Alice programs that represent a video game, movie, cartoon, or video. The movies are submitted electronically to the UAB judges prior to the film festival. Each movie is judged for an award. All movies are shown after the keynote presentation.

• All submissions will be shown once during the Film Festival, which will be from 1pm-3pm on May 16th, 2009. Those movies that are presented with awards will be shown to the combined HSPC audience during the awards ceremony. Those receiving awards must be present at the festival.

• The official rules are available here. Please read the rules carefully to ensure that submissions are not disqualified.

Directions and Parking Information

Parking information and directions to the CIS Department can be found here.

List of Prizes

All participants will receive a T-shirt and a certificate of participation. Prizes will be awarded to contestants with the top four scores computed from different categories (Elementary School, Middle School, High School). Over $1000 in prizes will be awarded, including:

Individual

First place:     $75 gift certificate, award plaque, and Alice textbook
Second place: $50 gift certificate and award plaque
Third place:    $25 gift certificate and award plaque
Fourth place:   an award plaque

Team

An award plaque will be presented to each of the top four team movies in each category (one plaque per team).

Official Program and Schedule

The 2009 official program listing all student movies is available here.

The schedule for the event is as follows:

1:00pm-1:30pm    Registration (CIS Lobby, First Floor of Campbell Hall)

1:30pm-3:00pm    Student Movie Showcase

3:00pm-4:00pm    Keynote with Dr. Wanda Dann

4:00-4:30pm        Awards Ceremony

Original Contest Flyer

The 2009 flyer that advertises the event is available here.

Dedication

In memory of Dr. Randy Pausch This year’s Alice Festival is dedicated to the honor and memory of Dr. Randy Pausch, as we thank him for the great passion he had for encouraging us all to realize our childhood dreams. A link to Dr. Pausch's archive web page, with video links to the Last Lecture and other information about pancreatic cancer, is available here.

Keynote Presentation

Dr. Wanda Dann, Carnegie Mellon University A keynote presentation will serve as a common event that unites participants of the Alice Film Festival with the contestants of the High School Programming Contest. The keynote speaker will be Wanda Dann, who is Director of the Alice Project. Wanda's research interests include visualization in programming and programming languages and innovative approaches to introductory programming. Dr. Dann is an international leader in Computer Science Education and has served as a leader in many capacities of the annual SIGCSE conference. She is a co-author of the book, Learning to Program with Alice.

Past Film Festivals

The results of previous file festivals are available, including photos, submitted movies, and various videos. The past contests are organized by year of competition:

2007 Inaugural Film Festival

2008 Film Festival (coming soon)

Contest Organization

Organization

To contact the organizers, please send and email to gray@cis.uab.edu, or call (205)-934-8643.

Dr. Jeff Gray (Film Festival Director)

Judges

Chair: Dixon Shuttleworth (UAB CIS)

Eric Frees (UAB CIS)

Ross Ptacek (UAB Mathematics)

Isabel Rosenblitt (Kennesaw State University)

Sponsors

We gratefully acknowledge the support of the following organizations in providing resources and support to the Alice Film Festival:

Page last updated: May 16, 2009