The Chronicle of Higher Education writes,

Alice, the software program he created to entice students, is now being used at about 15 percent of colleges and universities nationwide. This month, a beta version of Alice 3.0 will be released, letting students create animated movies and games with new characters from The Sims video games and teaching advanced users the Java programming language in the process. The software is freely available from Carnegie Mellon’s Web site.

Read the entire article at the Chronicle

While the switch to actual coding is still in beta Alice, it’s an interesting way to get students engaged in programming, for sure.