Scratch

My friend Bob was in town yesterday, and he turned my family on to something called Scratch. This is a little programming setup you can download for free from the MIT Lifelong Kindergarten Group, which allows you to write your own programs using drag and drop lines of code that fit together like building blocks. (No syntax errors!) Bob wrote a little tank battle game for us, and Thomas and I helped him work on it. I spent an hour this morning working on a little space battle game; I made my asteroids bounce randomly around the screen! I intend them to be obstacles that get in the way of the players' spaceships.

It's a lot of fun, and I highly recommend it for parents who want to expose their kids to real programming in a fun way -- and also for adults who want to waste a lot of time with logic puzzles that make things move around on a little screen.