[kemiller]

I think minecraft fits the bill pretty well actually. Kids make all kinds of things in there, and it's not fragile in the way traditional programming is.

The article sort of gets hung up on form factor. Tablets are yet another window into the universe of computing, and there's a lot of creation happening.

I suspect that the real promised land will need VR for Lego-like construction of components and/or AI-assisted compilers enabling a sort of DWIM programming. As it is programming is just too fragile to be of interest to the "laity."

[malloryerik]

I thought of Minecraft too, and the other games that can be modded.

The ComputerCraft mod is interesting, especially a version where you can use a simple GUI inside Minecraft itself to create Lua scripts that control robots "turtles" and computers in the game world: http://computercraftedu.com/

A seven-year-old can make programs (maybe from smaller functions that they've already written) that will hopefully find the diamonds, build the houses, and manage the farms of their Minecraft life.

This seems possible because of the limited number of objects and actions in a Minecraft world, while Minecraft is still rich enough for plenty of experimentation, trial and error, and aha moments...