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.
The 8th and 9th grade children have started to use this program. As they are quite familiar to Scratch programming, they should get the nuances of Alice also. They have not made anything substantial yet as they have been playing around with Alice only for the past 2 classes. They seem eager to learn and are liking it also. So, they should be doing something interesting over the week!
Ref : http://www.alice.org/index.php?page=what_is_alice/what_is_alice