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Logo is the most memorable in a lineage of games that have tried to make programming fun and intuitive. I was reminded of it recently when I saw a demonstration of Kodu, a newly released video game from Microsoft aimed at the 9-and-over crowd. Kodu is light years beyond Logo, with modern 3-D graphics, a world players can landscape to their liking, and a cast of characters that isn't limited to the Terrapene genus. But the mission is pretty much the same: to place kids in an open-ended environment and arm them with a simple language that lets them build things. At the risk of blaspheming my youth, I dare say that Kodu is more fun than Logo. It's also a reminder that the mission of games like these is not actually to teach kids how to write code. It's to teach them how to think like programmers.
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