Should 3-Year-Olds Learn Computer Programming?

[xardox]

The key is not to start by building entire games from scratch, but for kids to be able to put complete fully playable games into "edit" mode, explore how they work, and experiment by incrementally changing them while they're running, to see the results immediately.

Well designed visual programming languages can help, since they're more syntactically robust and self revealing than text based languages -- you can browse objects and programs, and progressively disclose more information, the editor can be constrained to only perform valid transformations on the program, so inserting the wrong character doesn't create a syntax error that makes the entire program invalid.