I just came across scratch, a programming environment developed by people at MIT media lab. It is wonderfully designed, fun, pleasant and powerful program environment, specifically designed for kids to learn how to program. I downloaded it and showed it to Daniel (11 years old), in few minutes he started making his own games and animations. It is an open source environment so kids can peek into how other more mature programmers wrote their program and learn from them and try to improve them. It also has tagging and ranking feature, just like YouTube. In fact, the user interface of the web site looks just like YouTube. It also has tremendous educational possibilities for kids to express their ideas in a rich-media environment. The project was funded NSF. This is a wonderful use of the taxpayers’ money.
