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Creating 3D interactive environments without learning programming can be such a chore. Alice from Carnegie Mellon is a breath of fresh air in that respect as it allows rapid development of an interactive environment by just about anyone who can read and click a mouse.

It could be used in just about any curriculum subject to animate a scene (eg Drama - plan a dance routine; PE - plan that set move attack for football/hockey; Science - annotate the launch and trajectory of a rocket; English - animate a scene between characters etc etc) to induce learning through increased motivation and to demonstrate a full understanding of the topic involved. For ICT specialists, as a means of teaching sequential (and parallel) control programming it beats LOGO hands down (compare “make the turtle move forward 5″ against “make the astronaut jump 5 metres above the surface of the moon when he is clicked, and at the same time make the aliens retreat 1 metre”. No contest). For other subject specialisms, the environment is so easy to learn that pupils can rapidly make their own animations to reflect and develop their learning. Especially useful will be the next version of Alice which makes use of characters from The Sims - I’m thinking that the possibilities in Citizenship and PSHE are broad, and the facility for young learners to animate their own people is a huge incentive.

I can heartily recommend Alice; here’s a report on a session I did with a friend’s 10-year old son. We spent about 30 minutes with him going through the basics and then let him loose. The results in learning were awesome, and below is the (rapidly-produced) podcast interview we did. Note that the podcast is about 9Mb in size.