As a kid it was bug-catchers, Mechanno, and as I got older the 200-in-1 electronic kits from Tandy, and Dick Smith that helped me understand how things worked. Dad tended to draw the line at power tools (though shotguns and rifles were fine?!).  Our television was the oldest in the neighbourhood and servicing it was a regular occurance on weekends before  the serious Saturday and Sunday night movie marathons began. Sometimes he would allow me to change a valve but mostly my sisters and I had to sit back in a wide arc and just be ready to wack him with a piece of wood. Unfortunately that never happened either. Anyway, on top of those things came sport, music, language, and reading. I learned a great deal as a kid through some wonderful experiences but such a busy schedule is pretty standard fare for a kid growing up today, and in most cases we take it all in our stride.

From a childhood learning perspective, yesterday we talked about incorporating open source software development languages into secondary education curriculums. That makes sense because of the proximity to graduation and the "real-world" application that senior students will require as they approach the end of their journey through the system. But what about early childhood learning and discovery? While teaching kids a computer programming language at a very young age may have sounded like a strange thing to do even a generation ago, from a K/P-7 curriculum perspective, it is really no different from the music and language lessons which kids undertake today. Many pre-prep or kinder centres even start children on basic French and Italian before they get to school.

Back in June 2007 Longhaus undertook research into programming language seeding programs such as Microsoft's SoftwareAP.net. As a result of the major investments being made in code development, and the general onward march of software and business application maturity, we suggested that the dominant regional language across Asia Pacific in the next 50 years may not be Mandarin, Cantonese, or even Japanese, but instead it would be a programming language. Think .Net, Java, PhP. Really think about that for a second. What we were attempting to say was that programming languages are fast becoming the modern equivalent of the classics (certainly no harder than Latin) that we learnt as children. Now enter Kodu.

Kodu was designed by Microsoft Research as a visual programming language for gaming and creative development. While destined for gaming it really belongs inside Microsoft Education and from there inside the revised curriculums of Australia's primary schools. While originally designed for an older audience kids as young as 5 love it for their ability to build and make things work inside a computer. It is incredibly flexible for use across the K-7 program as behaviorally a 5 year old will use it in different ways to say a 7, 9 or even 13 year old. But the point is that they do. And the downstream benefits are potentially tremendous.

The bottom line for today is that ICT policy #10 says invest in the future. Just because most adults are daunted by computer programming, doesn't mean we should rob our kids of the opportunity to embrace it as the modern critical skill that it will become.