"Scratch deals well with 2-D graphics, text, and other somewhat
"flat" programming concepts. By contrast, Alice teaches programming
fundamentals in the form of 3-D movies and games. Alice is
developed in Java, and is somewhat like Scratch in that you build
things in a drag and drop interface.
"Alice, developed by a group of researchers at Carnegie Mellon
University, has releases for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows, and is
released under an aptly titled Alice License. The environment is
open source in the sense that you can download and examine the
source code, but the creators prefer to work exclusively in-team,
and don't take outside contributions. Alice has been around since
1999, making it one of the oldest and most developed environments
for teaching children how to program. It is because of this that
it's used in schools all over the world."