Programming for Kids

Lately I've been thinking about how to get my kids more interested in programming.  When I was a kid about the only free programming language was the version of Basic that came on a Radio Shack TRS-80 computer. Everything else either ran on a mainframe, or required purchasing a fancy compiler.

Nowadays there's a glut of languages.  It seems like the closest relation to Basic in the 21st century is Javascript.  It's an interpreted language, runs in a sandbox environment so you can't do much permanent harm, but powerful enough that you can create some pretty cool projects.

Looking around the Internet for kids programming projects, I found Blockly, a web-based graphical programming editor that converts to Javascript. One demo project: write a Blockly program that runs this maze.

Click here to see the solution that I came up with.