The introduction programming courses (for non majors) use Alice and I think that without having a strong professor to tie the visual to real programming together, the connection is lost on students.
For example, my girlfriend took the intro course and did pretty well but they moved on to real Java and object oriented programming she felt like she had wasted 1/4th of the semester on the visual programming aspect, and would have much rather just learned the normal way.
I think a better way to approach this is to design labs that are both easy, educational, and satisfying to the student. This isn't that hard to do with the numerous graphical libraries that simplify programming for the student.
For example, my girlfriend took the intro course and did pretty well but they moved on to real Java and object oriented programming she felt like she had wasted 1/4th of the semester on the visual programming aspect, and would have much rather just learned the normal way.
I think a better way to approach this is to design labs that are both easy, educational, and satisfying to the student. This isn't that hard to do with the numerous graphical libraries that simplify programming for the student.