During a TEDTalkxBeaconStreet, Mitch Resnick discussed how everyone should open up to a different dialog and learn how to do simple program. The director of the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab has created a web site called Scratch. This site gives the users the opportunity to learn how to program and expand their communication toolkit.
Resnick talked about the different projects that users have worked on, including Mother's Days cards. He sent his mother a collection of Mother's Day projects from the site, which inspired his 86 year old mother to learn how to make a card. She sent him one for his birthday. As shown in the screen shot, there are over three million projects currently uploaded to the site.
The program is free, and can be downloaded to Mac OSX 10.4 and later; Windows 2000, XP, Vista, and 7; Debian / Ubuntu. There's a tutorial to teach you the basics of using building blocks and sprites (the name for the characters used for different programs) to animate them and have fun with the projects. There's samples to look at to get the creative juices flowing. Definitely, easier than attempting coding at square one for people, who are interested in trying, but may not have the know-how to be experts.
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