Alice for Schools

If you have not already seen this it is worth thinking about downloading the software and having a go!
Manchester University have designed some 3D animation software for use by pupils. There are 2 programs available for download, one for primary and one for secondary pupils (probably worth looking at both because some primary pupils will be able to use the secondary software). The University is also running a competition but this is not a requirement of downloading the software.
You can download the software and 3D object here;

http://www.cs.manchester.ac.uk/Digital60/Digital60-AliceCompetition/about-competition/faq.php

text below taken from the website.

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. Alice is a teaching tool for introductory computing. It uses 3D graphics and a drag-and-drop interface to facilitate a more engaging, less frustrating first programming experience.Alice 2.0 is designed for high school and college students.Storytelling Alice is designed for younger students. Storytelling Alice was created by Caitlin Kelleher as part of her doctoral work in Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. Generally speaking, the characters have a wider range of behaviours/emotions than those in Alice 2.0, that might be useful as part of a story. Although the developers state that Alice 2.0 and Storytelling Alice are designed for particular age groups, it does not really matter which version is used by which age group. It would probably be wise to try both to see which one would be most useful for a particular animation.