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Mama FAQContents
What is Mama?Mama is an educational programming language and development environment, designed to help young students start programming by building 3D animations and games. With Mama you can build and edit scenes, use rich object gallery, create 3D objects, create movies and upload to YouTube/Facebook, create your own stand alone Mama programs, build interactive tutorials (for instructors), and much more. Also, Mama is Unicode, and it lets you write the programming code in your mother tongue.Mama current version was integrated with Carnegie Mellon Alice environment to support 3D scenery. Where do I download Mama from?Use the downloads page for downloading.I downloaded Mama, what's now?Run the installation file and follow the installation instructions. At complete of installation, run Mama. We recommend first on running some example worlds, and after you get some idea of what is Mama, try working with the tutorials. Click here for the complete documentation of Mama.Is Mama free?No. Mama can be downloaded and used for 30 days, then you will have to purchase a license.Starting from Mama version 1.5.4, the installation program contains a Mama free IDE for editing and debugging Mama programs with no 3D support. What are the differences between Mama and Alice?Mama is a collective name for both a programming language and an integrated development environment(IDE). Starting on version 1.5, Mama programming language was integrated into the open source Alice IDE, to support scenery and 3D programming. Both the programming language and the IDE are Unicode and translated to languages other that English, thus letting students write programs in their mother tongue. Mama also contains many improvements to the Alice IDE:
I uploaded a movie to YouTube, and got two windows opened, one in YouTube telling me the movie has not yet processed, and the other on Facebook, but with no image in it, what should I do?At complete of a YouTube upload, Mama opens two web pages, one at YouTube containing the movie settings page, and the other at Facebook for adding the video to the profile. Sometimes the video is not fully processed by YouTube, and in these cases you simply have to wait few moments and refresh the YouTube page, until you see your video available. Then, go to the Facebook page and refresh it - you should see now the publishing form with the video image.Can I use Alice worlds in Mama?Yes, you can import Alice worlds into Mama. To do that, select from the menu "tools", then "import Alice2 world", and import your world. The world will be saved with the same original name but with Mama file extension (.mam).What is the assert keyword for?Mama has a valuable keyword/instruction called assert - you use it to assert that certain conditions apply while you type your code. Asserts are executed only during development, and not in standalone. It is very helpful in debugging your code.What is the script command for? What can I do with it?You can write Mama scripts within Mama in two ways: 1) If you drag the Script tile from the bottom of the window and drop it into the editor area, you will be able to write Mama language script such as math calculations, web access and manipulation of objects in the 3D area. 2) If enableFreeScripting is on, you can write in a full editor window a main script that will be executed at start of world run. |