Alice Worlds Research Articles

The Fabulous Journeys of Alice and Pinocchio: Exploring their Parallel Worlds

The Fabulous Journeys of Alice and Pinocchio: Exploring their Parallel Worlds

Engaging middle school teachers and students with alice in a diverse set of subjects

This paper describes the integration of the Alice 3D virtual worlds environment into a diverse set of subjects in middle school, including the development of tutorials, example worlds and lesson plans. In the summer of 2008 our experiences with middle school teachers included three-weeks of training in Alice and guidance in the development of lesson plans. Our experiences with middle school students involved two one-week summer camps of instruction in Alice. We found both the teachers and the students strongly engaged with Alice. The teachers created lesson plans with Alice worlds to interactively teach a topic and other lesson plans in which students build an Alice world on a particular topic either from scratch or using a template world. The students in the Alice camps had both instruction in Alice and free time to develop Alice worlds of their choice. We found that the students used a large variety of basic Alice concepts and computer science concepts in the worlds they built in their free time.

Reasoning about public-key certification: on bindings between entities and public keys

Public-key certification is of crucial importance for advancing the global information infrastructure, yet it suffers from certain ambiguities and lack of understanding and precision. This paper suggests a few steps toward basing public-key certification and public-key infrastructures on firmer theoretical key. In particular, we investigate the notion of binding a public to an entity. We propose a calculus for deriving conclusions from a given entity Alice's (for instance, a judge's) view consisting of evidence and inference rules valid in Alice's world. The evidence consists of statements made by public keys (e.g., certificates, authorizations, or recommendations), statements made physically toward Alice by other entities, and trust assumptions. Conclusions are about who says a statement, who owns or is committed to a public key, and who transfers a right or authorization to another entity, and are derived by applying the inference rules.