Alice

I think Alice 2 and 3 (There are 2 versions. Alice 3 focuses more on laying the groundwork for programming in Java) are wonderful tools not only for learning basic programming concepts, but for learning critical thinking and problem solving. I found that my students who had SLDs in math benefited the most from this, as it taught them another way to think. They could apply the steps we learned using Alice to their math and suddenly it was making sense. I would highly recommend any teacher with mature 5th graders and up to consider Alice an option for teaching intro to programming or problem solving in general.