I came across an interesting article in Campus Technology’s article about MIT’s graphical programming language for novices. Researchers in the MIT Media Lab’s “Lifelong Kindergarten Group” have created a program called Scratch, a graphical programming language that is designed to be used by programming novices, including children and teens. A description of Scratch by the team notes that “as students work on Scratch projects, they have opportunities to learn important computational concepts such as iteration, conditionals, variables, data types, events, and processes.”
Access SCRATCH website and download program here
Interesting paradaigm, though there has been a motion towards this for years. The isolation of the developer and the designer is the key for greater accessibility to programming.