I can imagine having some visual blocks and wires to get a wanted output image, and then gradually it could use symbols or function names instead of the pictures, or you could even go deeper into the blocks to get down to more lower level instructions...
A friend of mine created the board game Robot Turtles ("programming for preschoolers"), which has a bit of that goal. It's a parent-child(ren) thing rather than a solo activity, mind you.
None of the apps suggested actually help learn to think logically like you do when programming. There is ONE app I found that does just that and nothing more.
Kodable. It's free but more importantly, it teaches kids about loops and sequencing commands - things you do on a day to day basis while programming (unless you're a functional programmer haha).
I guess it comes down to what it means to "think logically"? If you can solve previously unseen algebra problems, and improve your understanding you're having to "think logically" - you're not just randomly button pressing, you're seeing the pattern.
I just got my 7 year old daughter started on the http://code.org/ exercises. She completed the hour of code, got her certificate, and is now always saying to me "Daddy can we do some more code"?
ScratchJr for tablets (iOS, Android). It is much better than Scratch for young kids (the mouse and keyboard are from the 20th century): http://www.scratchjr.org/
> It is much better than Scratch for young kids (the mouse and keyboard are from the 20th century)
As a father of two young boys, I don't think that "tools are from the 20th century" is the reason that it's easier for young kids. It's more about touching and pointing being more intuitive than typing and using a mouse. Kids will adapt to whatever tools they are given. The fact that most of us these days will put kids in front of a touch-enabled device before a keyboard doesn't mean that the keyboard is any less useful or important. It's still going to be a while before touch-and-gesture will be a better tool than typing for writing code.
Please take it with a pinch of salt. The keyboard and mouse are not obsolete but when you see a young kid putting so much energy in learning how to drag and drop objects in Alice ( http://www.alice.org/index.php ) instead of creating things the multitouch devices bring a solution.
That would be awesome. I like CodeCombat but it's still direct coding. It'd be nice to learn variables, control flow structures etc but visually. The same way that DragonBox doesn't make it explicit that you're actually learning algebra.
I can imagine having some visual blocks and wires to get a wanted output image, and then gradually it could use symbols or function names instead of the pictures, or you could even go deeper into the blocks to get down to more lower level instructions...
Like Blueprints in UE4 : https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Blueprints/G...