"Alice is an innovative 3D programming environment that makes it easy to create an animation for telling a story, playing an interactive game, or a video to share on the web ..."
Is it addictive enough to have a good chance that a pupil will remain interested. Is it motivating enough to start learning "normal" programming.
... or is it better to start with Logo?
It would be good to start learning programming at a young age lets say like 10-13 years old. Then when they get a little older move them up to C, C#, PHP, or python
because of how easy and 'fun' it can be to make a story it can get someone interested in programming who may not otherwise have thought about it
Seems like a good program for young programmers, we used Logo when I was at school.
I recently got told about Scratch which might be worth you looking at.
I've played with Storytelling Alice and found this pretty compelling. It is based on Alice, but with additions to make it more interesting (and easier to get into) for Middle School kids.
I liked what I saw. The program, built with a GUI so syntax errors weren't possible, translated almost immediately into working animations. Nice.
I've started teaching programming to my kids, aged 8 and 10, using scratch. So far it has been a great experience for all of us. They learned really fast.
I used the Scratch cards that can be found here http://info.scratch.mit.edu/Support/Scratch_Cards. After session 2 they were asking me when we would do session 3. This means they didn't get bored which is great.
I used Alice in high school, and I must say that it drove me absolutely nuts with boredom. I can put a rabbit on the screen and make him jump, I get it...
I personally prefer Logo, as I found basic programming easier to grasp with it. With Alice, I could hardly see any connection to programming at all (this was after I had already learned a few other languages).
I think if you start with Alice, students will expect all programming is just drag-and-dropping, and not get into the habit of typing code in, so I'd recommend Logo (or some other language).
When I discovered Alice, I thought my 9 year old son would absolutely love it. I downloaded all the models and everything for him. However, he got bored with Alice pretty quickly.
He likes to make games, so he uses graphical game making programs like the Games Factory and a few others. To some extent you learn programming in those types of applications. I would much rather he spend his time making games than spend all day playing them. At the very least he learns logical thinking and gets to be creative.
I'm not really sure why he doesn't like Alice. I suspect it is because most of what you do in Alice (as of about a year ago) is more like writing a story than writing an interactive game that gives the operator many choices. Although, I must admit the ease of getting 3D Graphics working is very cool.
So in answering your question more directly, it has been my anecdotal experience that it had an initial cool factor, but it wore off in less than a week for my son. If the person you want to get interested in computers is creative and likes computer games then maybe investing in something like The Games Factory or Multimedia Fusion from www.clickteam.com will generate an interest as they will be able to do a lot more in less time. It certainly has kept my son interested, since he was around 6. (P.S. I have absolutely no affiliation with clickteam, that just happens to be my son's favorite).
I took a course on Alice and it's not bad for a High School kid and for people who doesn't know a thing a about using classes for object oriented programming. Where I disagree is that in some Universities after giving a first and second course in C++ they offer a course for better understanding of objects using Alice where you can't apply any of the knowledge in code to the IDE. I am starting to use free open source software "OGRE 3D" and I think is perfect for students with previous knowledge of C++ code to integrate and understand better interactions of graphics, objects and code.
I have been using Alice as part of an intro to programming at Uni. I have found that it as helped explain several object oriented concepts much better than some of the programming I have already done on various jobs.
How properties work and how they cannot be accessed by other objects is much easier to visualise in Alice than in other languages when learning.
It is an excellent way to introduce programming to a beginner as the environment has hidden many of the syntax errors and frustrations that come with spelling mistakes or just trying to navigate an IDE.