Alice 3

Windows, Mac OSX, Linux

Teaches: programming, math, creativity

CTR Rating: 83.3333%

CTR Review

Named after the main character in "Alice in Wonderland", Alice has recently been upgraded. Like MIT's Scratch and Alan Kay's Squeak, Alice is a free programming language for children that can be downloaded and installed on a Macintosh, Windows or Linux computer. It is designed to turn programming into a drag-and-drop process, so children can struggle with the larger ideas rather than the semantics of code. While it's not as visual as Scratch, it's a good start. Alice is better suited to 3D character scripting than Scratch, such as what you might find running on a video game console, although the final results are -- at best -- crude. For a child graduating from Scratch who might be up for more of a challenge, Alice could be an introduction to a different kind of debugging and scripting similar to what might be experienced with Java, C++ or C#. Work can be exported as a movie or as a web page. Visit www.alice.org for more information. Alice was funded by Electronic Arts, Sun Microsystems, DARPA, Intel, Microsoft, NSF, and ONR.