I was following up on an article I read in this month's issue of Reading Today.  The article, "So Much Fun With Technology,"  highlights a free program that engages struggling readers. According to the article, "It is interactive, 3-D animation software available at no cost as a public service from Carnegie Mellon University at http://www.alice.org/."

From the website:
    What is Alice?
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 freely available teaching tool designed to be a student's first exposure to object-oriented programming. It allows students to learn fundamental programming concepts in the context of creating animated movies and simple video games. In Alice, 3-D objects (e.g., people, animals, and vehicles) populate a virtual world and students create a program to animate the objects.
In Alice's interactive interface, students drag and drop graphic tiles to create a program, where the instructions correspond to standard statements in a production oriented programming language, such as Java, C++, and C#. Alice allows students to immediately see how their animation programs run, enabling them to easily understand the relationship between the programming statements and the behavior of objects in their animation. By manipulating the objects in their virtual world, students gain experience with all the programming constructs typically taught in an introductory programming course.

One of the teachers interviewed for the article said that it accomplishes the following learning objectives:
*engaging students in a meaningful reading activity
*performing a close reading of a text
*making inferences
*making distinctions between essential and nonessential information 

Teaching resources, instructional texts, and support are also available on the site.  The program works with both PCs and Macs.