Found this on terranova from March this year
Storytelling in Wonderland
Nate Combs
In Ruby Slippers we discussed (in comments) the dreadful state that computer science education finds itself in the west US. Kami mentioned CMU's Alice in comment back then and Grady Booch reminds us anew recently:
"(Alice is) a modern programming environment designed to be a student's first exposure to object-oriented programming. It 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."
From SIGCSE feedback it may be that Alice is back (if it ever went away) with a Wonderland vengence. Will virtual worlds be the driver that revives computer science?
Take a look at the 2007 SIGCSE presentation (8mb PPT). Note the instructional material at aliceprogramming. From the SIGCSE slides, the 3.0 version is slated for release in 2008. Mentioned is Caitlin Kelleher's work with Storytelling Alice (dissertation, 15mb PDF): Using Storytelling to Make Computer Programming Attractive to Middle School Girls.
Worth the visit! (
http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nov...elling_al.html)
Same author and his dissertation, so it seems a technique of using alice in educational context, not a special software.