Teaching Kids Programming with Free Programming Languages

"Alice
Alice is a creative "drag and drop" 3D programming environment that makes it easy for kids to create simple animations for story-telling, interactive games, or for sharing videos on the web. It can be a great teaching tool since it is designed to introduce students to object-oriented programming and at the same time allows them to learn fundamental programming concepts. In Alice's interactive interface, students drag and drop graphic tiles to create a program, where the instructions correspond to standard statements in a production oriented programming language, such as Java, C++, and C#. Alice is free and open source, and is available for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows.

"Scratch
Scratch is an interpreted dynamic visual programming language that has a main goal of teaching programming concepts to children (preferably 8 and up) and letting them create games, videos, and music."

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