To Teach Computing, a New Tool Calls on The Sims

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.
A previous version, Alice 2.0, introduced a "drag and drop" feature that let students place characters and objects in relationships that resulted in actions, without manually typing in code.


http://chronicle.com/article/To-Teach-Computing-a-New-Tool/47956/

Has a nice tutorial, fun to play with it, here you can download it : http://www.alice.org/