[noduerme]

Yeah, you must be my age. I was kinda blessed to go to a school that had a couple Apple IIes and let the kids take turns using Logo to draw shapes with the turtle, when I was 8 years old or so. I'd written some BASIC before on my mom's IBM-PC (stupid "Hello, what's your name?:" GOTO 100 kind of stuff), but Logo was a new way of thinking about the screen for me. Probably that and the early Rand/Robyn games (the Manhole, Cosmic Osmo) got me into coding. Soon after, my school bought some Mac SEs and I spent the rest of my elementary school screwing around with HyperCard after school, trying to make an RPG.

If there's one thing I'd love to suggest to parents, it's this: Give your kid an obsolete platform with nothing to do on it except make stuff and figure out how it works. It's just as entertaining, but diametrically opposite in terms of educational quality from giving them pre-made apps to play with.

(Full disclosure: My dad wouldn't even allow D&D into the house because it was someone else's game. If we wanted RPGs, we had to design our own on paper.)