Students Collaborate to Code with It Takes 2 Alices
Two middle school students wearing augmented reality glasses and holding “magic wands” are standing around a table. While it looks like they are just playing a futuristic game, they are learning to code.
Looking through their AR glasses, in It Takes 2 Alices, created by a team of Carnegie Mellon University Entertainment Technology graduate students in Spring 2026, middle school students see a holographic animation of a whimsical scene with signposts, a wooden tunnel, and running dogs made of cards and work together to solve puzzles, using the building blocks of coding.
Where a board game would be placed on the table, there is instead a playmat for the Tilt Five platform, an augmented reality system that projects 3D graphics onto the mat, which the AR glasses then display.
“The Tilt Five is great because there aren’t many other options to sit around a large space or screen with augmented reality. With Tilt Five, each player sees a different perspective from the AR glasses they are wearing,” said the It Takes 2 Alices team.
Since 1995, CMU’s educational platform Alice has been bringing coding to classrooms, from elementary through university, in an accessible way. Inspired by Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and developed by ETC co-founder Randy Pausch, Alice has evolved over time from a virtual reality prototyping tool into a broader educational platform.
Building on that history, the It Takes 2 Alices game extends Alice to reach middle school students, making the introduction to coding’s foundational building blocks fun, exploratory, and social. “This Tilt Five experience suits a younger audience, and we decided to focus the audience for It Takes 2 Alices on students aged 10-13, making this game an introduction to what students can learn next in Alice.”
The It Takes 2 Alices Carnegie Mellon University ETC team of graduate students included Oscar Mailman (Co-Producer and Designer), Sapphire Ruan (Co-Producer and Designer), Chufan Chen (Programmer), Yuchen Xue (Programmer and Sound Designer), Yiran (Emily) Zhang (Artist), and Oulan Li (Artist). The project’s instructor was Dave Culbya.
Two Perspectives, One Goal
“We had students that, by the end, were talking the whole time even when they didn’t talk or know each other before. Students were not only learning the programming concepts and enjoying the game, but they were wanting to learn more and having fun figuring things out together,” said the It Takes 2 Alices team.
“One of our big playtesting metrics was ‘How often are the students talking to each other?’ or ‘Is one person taking control?’ said the It Takes 2 Alices team. “Playtesting with the 10-13 age group was challenging at first, but as they kept trying the game, they had many ideas they wanted to share.”
“We have to get over the barrier of the intimidation of programming and make it social and not too challenging,” said Mailman. “One of our inspirations was the method of ‘pair programming’, where two programmers work together on the same workstation.”
Collaborative Learning with Tilt Five
On designing It Takes 2 Alices for this younger audience, Mailman said, “As our team doesn’t come from a teaching background, one of our challenges was to determine what was the best way to communicate to students. We acknowledge that this is the work we do every day, so it’s challenging for us to get into this headspace.”
As students progress through five levels in around 15 minutes, they experiment to gradually learn the foundations of coding, learning from the cause-and-effect of their actions and how the holographic dog animations respond.
“When the team was discussing how far to push the game and how challenging to make it, we landed on the objective that we are not creating something like a teacher lecturing; the objective is for students to work together to figure things out and learn subtly. Overall, the goal is to reduce the barrier to programming,” said the It Takes 2 Alices team.
Both It Takes 2 Alices and the original Alice use block programming, which allows students to drag programming commands from a menu bar into the scene to run the animation.
Just as Alice found her way in Wonderland, It Takes 2 Alices uses signposts that guide students to experiment. By attaching tiles to the signposts and cards to the dogs, they debug code, use IF statements, operators, and loops. For example, when learning how to “run” a program at the start of the game, students experiment by adding different tiles, which contain the directions for the card dogs, to the signposts.
“Students can experiment and run the program again and again by slotting different tiles into the signposts,” said Chen. “By trying the different tiles and seeing in the holographic animation the direction that the card dogs run to as a result, the students learn how to solve the puzzle.”
As part of the team’s final It Takes 2 Alices project, which they plan to release on Steam in the future, the team drafted documentation on the best way to develop for the Tilt Five and a teacher’s guide for how the It Takes 2 Alices experience can be used in the classroom or a summer camp, including how to set up the Tilt Five and what coding concepts are being taught to the students.
Shifting Perspectives with Exploration and Collaboration
Just as the students learned through trial and error and experience, at the beginning of the semester the It Takes 2 Alices team wasn’t sure what to make of their broad initial challenge to combine Alice with the capabilities of the Tilt Five platform, which has been used in only a few ETC projects to date.
“We had to navigate many unknowns, and we had fun narrowing down our ideas over the semester to leave our mark on Tilt Five and Alice,” said Mailman.
“One point that is important is that our instructor gave us a lot of freedom to explore,” said Chen. “Once we settled on the direction and went down that path, that’s one of the main reasons why we had a pretty good experience.”
The team explained that designing something specifically for the Tilt Five allowed them to explore what could be done with the platform and its potential. “I’m interested to see what happens with the platform, and can’t wait for the wireless glasses,” said Mailman.
The team learned from each other, engaging in their own collaborative learning process and sharing expertise across disciplines such as design, programming, and art.
“I felt anxiety about creating levels without knowledge of programming skills when I don’t know as much about it,” said Mailman. “I had to accept that I am not an expert on this topic, admitting what I don’t know, and having things explained to me by the programmers on the team, giving us the opportunity to level design together.”
Through exploration and collaboration, from the middle school students playing It Takes 2 Alices and the graduate students who created it, learning new skills such as coding unlocks new opportunities, ideas, and motivation for future exploration, both in Wonderland, academics, and beyond.
Source: It Takes 2 Alice’s Team