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.

• view Alice screenshot.

You can find some lesson plan ideas for working with Alice here.

Alice is available as a free download from www.alice.org, where you can also find teaching materials and tutorials.

• Competition registration and on-line submissions will open on Monday 11 January 2010.