Alice

Alice is a modern programming environment designed to be a student's first exposure to Object Oriented programming. It allows students to learn basic computer science while creating animated movies, simple Video games, where students control the behavior of 3D objects and characters in a virtual world.

http://www.alice.org

from Carnegie Mellon

Alice addresses the specific needs of the subpopulation of Middle School girls. By supporting Story Telling, an intrinsically motivating activity for middle school girls, Alice will make programming a means to an exciting end.

teacher's book http://www.aliceprogramming.net/

Java-based

going to be given access to The Sims characters/engine

The MacOs X download is 109MB! Hopefully lots of that is assets.

Separately, ALICE is a ChatBot variant - see AIML