Suitable environment for a 7 year old [closed]

Answer 1

Flee from Java! Try something designed for teaching, like scratch, LOGO, or PLT Scheme.

Answer 2

Etoys is perhaps the thing you're looking for. It's a partly graphical flavour of smalltalk made just for children. This is used by the olpc project.

Answer 3

I would have looked for one of the many arcade game engines and let him play with that. Choose one where he will need to use loops and conditions, and maybe some procedures.

Answer 4

I recently responded to a similar SO question with a pointer to kidbasic, which is open source and cross platform software.

Answer 5

I read this post earlier today, and then by chance accidentally went to YUP.com and discovered

Teaching Kids to Hack(Program) with Hackety Hack

Figured I'd post it as an additional resource for anyone looking at this question.

Answer 6

Scratch is another one. Developed at MIT specifically for the purpose of teaching programming to children.