Alternative languages

I'm a high school teacher in the U.S. with a programming class. I've done a lot more with Greenfoot this year than Robocode, but with Greenfoot and Robocode one has everything needed to keep kids motivated to write code. In that sense, Robocode has been great entertainment personally and a great boon professionally. Running a local rumble server a few years ago for the kids to compete in was tremendous fun for me and them!

It would be great to provide students with an in to Robocode utilizing a language with simpler syntax and less "don't worry about these big chunks of text for now... but you need them or it won't work" type provisos. Python or Lua would be neat choices. I've got to say I'd love to see any new language choices able to work within Robocode proper though... as has been done with .Net implementation.