Visual Effect choices?

[Sophie]

I am graduating one of my kids from Scratch to Alice. One of the things I taught them to do in Scratch was to build a non-visual model of their world using dependent object attributes (e.g. volcano.height = f(# of eruptions)).

They then separately add Scratch visual effects based on these attributes (e.g. color effects, pixelation, brightness, ... all controllable by numbers).

I have found doing this in multiple iterations, they build much richer apps/games, with less complexity.

I have not yet found a good selection of comparable visual effects in Alice, that I can control with reasonable convenience from numeric attributes.

Question: Where should I look, and what might I find?

In addition, one of the problems I am finding is that more sophisticated math operations (besides +, -, *, / ) are defined on the world, and seem to be impossible to get at from methods of non-world objects, unless I create duplicate wrappers on my objects to call the world methods.

Question: Is there a better way?

Thanks!

[Sophie]

Answering part 2 of my own question -- re: math functions. I simply had to drag the world functions onto the object methods to use them. I was initially looking for these in the pop-up "expression" menus and did not find them there.