Alice - 3D Educational Software

Alice invigorate the teaching learning experience at schools. Both these softwares are free, open source and developed at highly ranked research universities.

Alice
http://www.alice.org/index.phpis a 3D educational software developed at Carnegie Melon University with the support from Oracle. This software is used by schools to teach animation and create simple educational games. By dragging and dropping graphic tiles containing standard programming statements, students develop programs that animate 3D objects that populate a virtual world. In the process, they sharpen their logical thinking and problem solving techniques. They also grasp basic object oriented programming terminology and concepts such as procedure definition, algorithms, functions and conditional statements.

It enables a new way to think and learn by populating virtual worlds intelligently, breaking problem statements into small tasks, and drawing up algorithmic expressions which help in problem solving.