Microsoft: Programming is Kid’s Play

They say generations are getting smarter, Microsoft Research creates a Programming Language for Kids.

Microsoft researcher Matt MacLaurin came up with an idea which would be considered brilliant provided Microsoft is ready to back them up. He wokeup from nowhere and realized that approach to computing has changed from what it used to be in his good old days. This realization came into the picture when he saw his kid watching mom using facebook in kitchen.

He came up with a brilliant idea of creating a new developer language that would appeal to the “current generation of kids”. He designed one that would work with what he calls “just a game controller, using basic rules to do things like move an apple across the screen”. Apple reminds of me that MacLaurin worked at Apple for five years before joining Microsoft.

The idea has been implemented into “Boku”, an all new programming language that could be run on an Xbox using only the console’s controller to create the basic logic. As some of you might know, MacLaurin demoed it at the 2007 TechFest internal science fair.

“That’s just in our DNA,” MacLaurin said. “We don’t really trust something until it is on our screen.”

Bodu got renamed to Kodu, somehow, and Now it’s on PC.

MacLaurin said the company had to do a fair amount of work to make Kodu work with a mouse as opposed to the controller. Ahem!

Whatever the explanation may be, this idea is catching up or atleast looks like from the numbers. It has gone mainstream into 200+ schools and  200,000 downloads [Free].

“We use it together,” he said, noting that at 5, his daughter is still younger than the 9-year-old age at which kids really start gravitating to Kodu. What he likes, though, is the logic skills it teaches her and the kinds of questions it creates in her mind. “It’s an opportunity to have conversations you don’t really have in other settings”.

What do you think ?

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[via zdnet]