I'm often looking at ways to help my children succeed in this life. And of course one of those ways is making sure that they are proficient with a computer.

Imagine my joy when I discovered that some folks at MIT went out of their way to create a programming language focused on children.

It's called Scratch, and uses a graphical approach to developing the programs.

I'm interested in this, and think I'll grab it for my eldest son soon.

Of course, I also have to wonder if the language will 'grow' with the boy. After all, drag and drop programming blocks is one thing, but being able to code the concepts that those blocks represent is something else all together.

If Scratch (and it's associated IDE) can allow the blocks to degrade into smaller and smaller concepts as the child becomes more proficient with programming, then I'd be all excited about that. Well, apparently their site is currently down due to extra traffic from the BBC and DIGG, so I haven't gotten a chance to play with it, and find out the answers to my thoughts listed above. I guess I'll try again in a few days, and see if I can grab a copy then.