A new book from No Starch Press, Super Scratch Programming Adventure!: Learn to Program By Making Cool Games makes it even easier to teach your kids basic programming skills.

Provide a brief tutorial on Scratch interface and basic features (can even use the built in ones through Scratch). Hands-on activity: Create a simple Scratch project to move a sprite. Day 2: Basics of ...

This beginner-friendly course introduces programming concepts through Scratch, a visual programming language developed at MIT. By dragging and dropping code blocks, learners can design animations ...

You get a stage, with cartoon characters, and drag blocks around to control them. Scratch is easy to use, and generally fun. Here’s how to use it to learn programming and coding on a Mac.

Move the Turtle (iPhone/iPad, $2.99): Similar to Daisy the Dinosaur, Move the Turtle teaches basic programming concepts by manipulating one graphical object through challenges.

With Scratch or Basic, complex things have a way of turning out complex, but that’s to be expected. If you want to try a Scratch-inspired take on microcontroller programming, check out MicroBlocks.

More than 150 characters are available for kids to use. The app's tutorial video is wordless and textless, except for a few numerals required for programming timers.