Scratch from MIT

Last Sunday, the New York Times had an article about a software development language for kids 8 and over.  It's called Scratch.  It can be found at http://scratch.mit.edu.  We downloaded it last week and my kids have been making programmes throughout the week.

Basically, Scratch has a drag and drop interface that work like lego.  You grab a block with an "if . . . then" and drag it onto your actions panel, then you drag other events (like "MouseOver") and actions (like "Add n to X") to fill in the blanks.  It works surprising well and give a good introduction to software programming.

If you have kids, you should check this out.