Saturday, November 08, 2008

"The Last Lecture" by Randy Pausch

Just finished reading "The Last Lecture" by Randy Pausch. It was written along with Jeffrey Zaslow after Pausch's lecture about life and preparing to die (Pausch passed away recently from cancer) to his Carnegie Mellon students.

The book itself is somewhat interesting, but it's primary impact was to make me want to actually watch the lecture itself and to learn more about some of the work that Pausch did while teaching. Two of the outputs of his efforts are the "Entertainment Technology Center" and "Alice".

The ETC is a master's degree program in what sounds to be incredibly cool stuff... robotics, video games, animation, etc. and Alice is a software program that teaches computer programming.

Additional information on these works as well as links to other aspects of Pausch's life can be found at http://www.thelastlecture.com/ and the aforementioned lecture itself is below...