I am a huge fan of MIT’s Scratch project. It is a visual programming environment for kids. Instead of writing code in a text editor, kids snap together templates to form scripts. The scripts are attached to sprites. Creating sprites is also super easy in the integrated graphics editor. Another wonderful thing about Scratch is that with the push of a button you can publish your project to the Web (where it runs as a Java Applet). My kids have created many projects with varying degrees of help from me. Yesterday we created our most involved project to date – a multiplication game. There are still a few bugs. It is a .0 release after all :), but it is playable. The kids are really excited about being able to share it with their friends over the web. We’ll probably publish some of the earlier efforts as well.
