CMU uses game maker's characters to interest girls in computer programming

The delights of computer programming can be a tough sell to many students -- particularly girls. "If you walk into a roomful of middle school girls and say'Do you want to learn how to program a computer?', "But if you walk in and say'Do you want to learn how to tell a story and make a movie?', all the hands go up." That's one reason why Dr. Pausch is so excited about a groundbreaking deal announced earlier this month in which video game giant Electronic Arts has agreed to donate the animation for characters from "The Sims" to Carnegie Mellon for use in a novice programmers' course the school has developed. Electronic Arts, Inc., headquartered in Redwood City, Calif., has sold 58 million copies of "The Sims," making it the best-selling video game of all time. Players can choose characters, build and furnish houses for them, and take care of them as they interact with each other. Carnegie Mellon will use the Sims characters in its "Alice" course, which is designed to make basic programming more palatable to students by allowing them to move animated figures around on the computer screen rather than writing abstruse lines of code. Alice, first developed a decade ago, already has its own set of animated characters, which Dr. Pausch described as "the best we could make with our own two hands.