LORNA is 4, going on 5. I've never met her before, but her eyes light up when she sees me. She rushes over, blonde curls bouncing. "I'm going to sit on you!" she declares. I demur, so she climbs into the chair next to me. "I weigh forty pounds!" she exclaims.

I hand her the iPad I'm carrying and the silliness melts away in an instant. A teacher helps her load up an app, gives her a quick tutorial and she's off, pulling at icons, stringing instructions together, building animations. Lorna is on her third day of learning to program a computer.

Lorna and her classmates, who range in age from 4 to 7, are taking part in a pilot study here at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, to see how young children respond to ScratchJr, a spin-off of the Scratch programming language. Scratch was invented to teach students as young as 8 how to program using graphical blocks instead of text. Now even children who haven't yet learned to read or write are getting in on the act.

Tools like Scratch aim to address what their developers see as a lack of computer programming instruction in schools today. The general thinking is that children are growing up surrounded by powerful machines they do not understand and teaching needs to be overhauled to prepare today's youth for a future living and working closely with computers.

via Kindergarten coders can program before they can read by Michael Reilly - New Scientist.