
I stumbled upon a site from Carnegie Mellon University which is a FREE programming environment which allows students to learn the concepts of object oriented programming through building and animating virtual world scenes. After downloading and unzipping the program, you are given a step-by-step tutorial on how to use the application. It is quite fun, and you can build your own animation within minutes.
To get Alice, go to the downloads area of http://www.alice.org/
Alice runs on Windows, OSX and Linux.