As the proud father of an almost two years old son, I hope that my kid will share some of his hobbies with me. That means I hope my kid grows into a full geek who loves boardgames, videogames and programming!

In order to foster his interest in programming I already started to check what are the best toys/games to learn how to program.

Cubetto

Cubetto is the illegitimate child of the Logo turtle and a wooden box.

Kids use the directions blocks to program the movements of the Cubetto wooden robot. You lay out a big map on your floor and invent a story telling your kid where to move the robot:

This is a costly toy but the quality is indeniable. I bought this a few weeks ago, and my son is intrigued by it. He is still too young to reason about the programming aspect but he sure likes to press the “activate” button and to watch the moving cube crawls on the map!

Coji

I haven’t pull the trigger on Coji yet, but it is mostly a question of time until I do. This is a nice robot that you program from an app. The app is really more advanced than Cubetto programming language (but is less tactile for sure). My kid is really enamored with my iPad so I am sure this will be a hit with him during the coming year.