Create a "Scalatron for Kids" edition

[scalatron]

Time Estimate: 30-50 hours (completely unscientific - provided for comparison of feature complexity only)

Difficulty: not that hard, actually - could be all client-side; most work would be the tutorial.

Motivation: coding games, in a browser, would be a good motivator for learning programming. Scala is a great language that could be made very accessible in a restricted domain (like implementing a bot in a game) with some DSL magic. So Scalatron could become a nice teaching tool for getting children started with programming.

How to Implement:

• create a framework or DSL for bot programming that takes care of the housekeeping. Check out a bot in Scalatron/samples/ for a crude example of a framework.
• write some management code (maybe in the browser client?) that handles the wrapping/unwrapping of the code before it is sent to the server for compilation.
• then create a tutorial that starts from zero (literally: what is a program, a variable, an operation, a function, etc.) and takes kids through the concepts and steps of programming.

Note that an initial version could be just a DSL/Framework manager and a document that explains to an already-programming parent how to get started with this.