How do you write method in Alice programming?

Java

Alice is an innovative 3D programming environment that makes it easy to create an animation for telling a story, playing an interactive game, or a video to share on the web. Alice is a freely available teaching tool designed to be a student's first exposure to object-oriented programming. It allows students to learn fundamental programming concepts in the context of creating animated movies and simple Video Games. In Alice, 3-D objects (e.g., people, animals, and vehicles) populate a virtual world and students create a program to animate the 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. By manipulating the objects in their virtual world, students gain experience with all the programming constructs typically taught in an introductory programming course.

Primitive methods in Alice 2.0

1. move(direction,amount)
2. turn(direction,amount)
3. roll(direction,amount)
4. resize(amount)
5. say(what)
6. think(what)
7. playSound(sound)
8. moveTo(asSeenBy)
9. moveToward(target,amount)
10. moveAwayFrom(target,amount)
11. orientTo(asSeenBy)
12. turnToFace(target)
13. pointAt(target)
14. setPointOfView(asSeenBy)
15. setPose(pose)
16. standUp()
17. moveAtSpeed(direction,speed)
18. turnAtSpeed(direction,speed)
19. rollAtSpeed(direction,speed)
20. constrainToPointAt(target)

Methods in Alice

Methods in Alice can exist at either the world level or at the class (object) level. The closest analogy that I can draw to more conventional programming languages such as Java is that world-level methods are sort of like class methods in Java while class-level methods are definitely like instance methods in Java.

For this program, I defined two additional methods at the world level named:

1. setTheStage
2. playTheShow

As the names imply, the purpose of the first method is to get everything ready for the show and the second method actually presents the show. As you can see, the code in Listing 2 calls these two methods in sequence.