Can we teach kids to code, already? Childhood development that includes developing child developers (whew!) would be great: Kids who can code gain not only the obvious technical programming skills, but also the critical thinking, problem-solving and strategic design skills that coding engenders. Once upon a time, I learned BASIC in middle school – it taught me how to prioritize and troubleshoot and craft more efficient processes…skills I didn’t really learn from any other class.

The reason I bring this up: Vivian Cromwell shared the following on Google+, and I thought that if young children are already learning how to interact with apps and technology, then why not give kids the opportunity to develop something more intuitive to their abilities at that age?

Designing Apps for Kids (UX Mag): This article mainly covers the design practices for touched based applications for kids. For keyboard oriented computer devices, here is what I learned:

1) Fine motor skills/dexterity is still very much under development before age 4, so the apps should require zero to very minimum keyboard tapping. For this PBS Video app in Chrome Web Store, kids almost don’t need to do anything.

2) At 4+, they can do simple drag and drop to move objects, but you want to make objects sticky so the kids don’t need to hold down the keypad to move them from one point to another.

Javid Jamae notes: “Scratch is but one of many examples of a programming language for kids. I regularly post about the various languages onhttp://twitter.com/mykidcancode”

This also interests me because two of our (DFJ Mercury) portfolio companies – Kabongo and GameSalad - are in this space. Kabongo provides games that improve learning ability among young children, and the GameSalad platform enables anyone to create their own games…and some of the most successful game creators on GameSalad have been kids, like this 14-year-old from Kuwait: http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/meast/10/05/kuwait.iphone.teenager/index.html

Do you know of any national programs that foster programming skills among young children?

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