Free Interactive 3D Program....Alice

Alice is a 3D authoring system (thanks to Derek Wenmoth for this link) developed by the Stage 3 Research Group from Carnegie Mellon University.

Read the article at Science News for Kids explains why the Stage 3 Research Group decided to call this program Alice.

"The focus of the Alice project is now to provide the best possible first exposure to programming for students ranging from middle schoolers to college students." Alice allows students to learn basic computer science while creating animated movies, simple video games, where students control the behavior of 3D objects and characters in a virtual world.

Alice is opensource that means you can modify and learn from the program. Opensource also means that you now become a part of the Alice Community and share what you learn with other Alice users.

ALSO CHECK OUT....
If you haven't seen my previous post on Scratch you need to give this free program a look as well. I spent the day at MIT (Massachusettes Institute of Technology) with the group that developed Scratch....read more...

Classroom....
I would highly recommend downloading this application and giving it a try in your class. I downloaded it yesterday and had a play and in no time had created a character that was moving and shaking around the screen.