Alice in Computerland

I just returned today from the SIGCSE conference in Covington, KY and I must say it was the most engaging CS conference I've ever been to. SIGCSE is the Association for Computing Machinery's conference on CS education. The conference was a mix of vague and poorly fleshed out ideas ("Computational Thinking", "Programming Lite"), interesting panels on classroom experiences ("Things we wished they told us when we started teaching", "It seemed like a good idea at the time", "Nifty assignments"), upper level course tools and teaching strategies, and LOTS of lectures about the significant drop in new CS majors in the last 5 years or so and what to do about it.

One of the most interesting in the last category was a presentation on a programming language/development environment called Alice. The main selling point of Alice is that it allows you to very easily write programs for 3-D animation. Version 3.0, which comes out in 2008, takes it a step further by including all of the characters from The Sims 2. The focus of the presentation was on using Alice to create stories about the various characters. One of the presenters who just received her PhD from Carnegie Mellon, tested this out with middle school girls with apparently great success. Is this going to be the application that gets more people (in particularly women) into computer science? I don't know, but it looks very promising. I'm actually less interested in the animation aspect and more interested in the drag-and-drop programming interface that eliminates simple syntax errors (missing parentheses, brackets and semicolons in particular) that tend to frustrate first year computer science students.