My latest read – The Last Lecture

Have you ever been so moved by an event that you drop just about everything and rip through a book as quickly as possible?  Along with millions of people (6.5 million actually) I watched Randy Pausch’s famous last lecture at Carnegie Mellon on September 18, 2007 and was very moved to read his bookThe Last Lecture.

It goes without saying that the news of his passing was very sad.  And to make matters worse, I was unable to finish his book before his death. This has left me with a sense of being cheated in some way.

The book is very much the lecture with a bit more background on all his points from his famous presentation.

Randy wrote about one of the more important projects that has been handed over to a former student, Alice which is available at Alice.org.

Alice is a breakthrough 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 teaching tool for introductory computing.  And best of all for schools and educators, Alice is FREE.

This project helps young children learn computer programming.  His description in this book has provided a bit of inspiration for me to talk with my niece Maya about becoming a computer programmer.

Thanks to Randy and his students, young girls including my niece will be able to learn computer programming and use this as a foundation for their education.  His work lives on….and that’s a great thing.

Book website | Oprah Winfrey Show Appearance

Tags: Randy Pouch, The Last Lecture, YouTube, cancer, Childhood Dreams, reading