[jgoerzen]

I disagree. A blank command line is freedom. It's an invitation to do whatever you like. To discover. To try. To fail. To explore.

If you have 5 (or 50) icons to choose from, where's the blank slate? Where's the great outdoors? Where's the "I built it myself!"?

The boys love to eat the food from our garden that they helped plant and nurture a lot more than food from a store.

If they have ownership and freedom to explore, engagement is natural.

If you don't start with the preconceived notion that the command line is too hard or not engaging enough for children, maybe you will find that it isn't.

[icebraining]

I love the CLI and spend much more time in it than in every other UI, but I was a Windows user for years, where I barely used it, and I still felt all of that.

My blank slate was an empty text file in Notepad and a browser (this was on a public computer, I couldn't install stuff).

On the iPad, I'd say the blank slate is Codea: http://twolivesleft.com/Codea/