Google Doodle celebrates 50 years of kids coding

To kick off Computer Science Education Week, Google Doodle has featured its first kid-focused coding doodle in collaboration with Google Blockly and MIT Scratch.  Blockly and Scratch are visual block programming languages used to teach computer science concepts to kids and encourage the next generation of programmers. 

The interactive doodle revolves around a basic educational game (Coding for Carrots) where children program a rabbit across 6 levels by snapping together visual coding blocks based on the language Scratch. 

In a Google blog post Director of Communications at Scratch Champika Fernando recalls her time using Logo, the first programming language designed for kids.

It was developed by Seymour Papert and researchers at MIT who saw the value in teaching children about math and science. Like Logo, Scratch was developed at MIT and builds on Papert’s early ideas about kids and computers.