Alice
www.alice.org

A programming software designed for high school and university students, specifically targeted to girls. Supports the creation of interactive stories and games in 3D within a graphical drag and drop IDE. An offshoot application, Storytelling Alice, has been developed for girls at the middle school level.

Game Maker
www.yoyogames.com

Originally developed by Mark Overmars as an educational technology for his CS1 students, Game Maker is now one of the most widely used game engines, supported by an active forum of global game developers of all ages. Until now only available for the Windows platform, a Mac-compatible version was released in August 2010.

Greenfoot
www.greenfoot.org

Greenfoot is a graphical IDE (integrated development environment) that permits programmers to design two-dimensional games and virtual worlds while learning the fundamental concepts of object oriented programming utilizing Java. Greenfoot was developed by Michael Kolling’s team at the University of Kent and is supported by a number of sample projects and online tutorials.

Robocode
robocode.sourceforge.net

Originally debeloped by Mathew Nelson in 2001-2005, and now maintained by Flemming Larsen, Robocode is a Java-based development environment for creating virtual robots. Robocode's battles take place in an arena where a number of robots fight it out until only one is left. Robocode competitions are held worldwide at the secondary school and university levels.

RoboMind
www.robomind.net

A simple programming environment that alllows beginners to program a virtual robot. In addition to foundational programming concepts, students are introduced to robotics and artificial intelligence. Robomind is available as an open source, multi-platform free download.

Scratch
scratch.mit.edu

Developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group of the MIT Media Lab, Scratch is designed to help young people (ages 8 and up) develop 21st century learning skills through the process of designing games, stories, animations and art. As they create Scratch projects, young people develop important mathematical and computational concepts, while also acquiring an understanding of the process of design. Available as a free download.

Squeak
www.squeak.org

A graphical IDE appropriate for teaching foundational programmming concepts, as well as mathematics and physics concepts and multimedia literacies. Developed by Alan Kay, Dan Ingalls and others at the Xerox PARC facility, Squeak is availbable as a free download.

Stagecast Creator
www.stagecast.com

A visual programming language intended for use in teaching programming to young children, originally developed by Allen Cypher and David Canfield Smith of Apple's Advanced Technology Group (ATG). With Stagecast Creator users can create two-dimensional simulations, multi-level games, interactive stories by moving icons on the screen which generate rules for the objects (characters).

StarLogo TNG
education.mit.edu/drupal/starlogo-tng

StarLogo TNG (The Next Generation) version 1.0 was released in July 2008. It provides a 3D world using OpenGL graphics and a block-based graphical language to increase ease of use and learnability. It is written in C and Java.