ids love computers — everything from games to the internet keep them hooked on it for hours. For those who wonder how these wonderful programs are made, programming is the answer.

Yet, it's true that computer programming is not as common among children and the youth in our part of the world as it is in some other countries. To make it easy for children to explore the world of programming, there are few specially designed and simple-to-use computer languages which can be tried for fun and learning both.

One such tool is Scratch, developed by MIT — one of the most prestigious universities of the world. This programming language is specifically designed for young ones (eight years and above) to help them grasp ideas and creative thinking concepts while creating projects such as interactive animations, art, music, games, etc.

Scratch makes use of what is called 'Sprite' as basic building block. Sprites are actors that can be programmed, or can be edited in terms of their looks using the 'Costumes' tab. For example, a girl-walking sprite can be edited to have different costumes set for its rotation or movement, and sounds can also be set for sprites. In addition to this, new sounds or sprites can be added by importing an existing image or sound, or even by directly recording or snapping an image through the web-cam. This means there's enough room for customisation as users are not restricted to use only the built-in items.

Sprites are placed in the top left area called 'Stage'. Changing the background can give different looks to stage — say a football field would give a sport simulation look, while a jungle image can be a perfect background for an animal duel programming.

Programming is done through scripts in a very easy-to-learn manner. On the left, there's a 'Blocks Palette'. These blocks can be dragged and dropped to the adjacent panel called 'Scripts Area'. Scripts take different shapes and forms such as jigsaw puzzles so that they can be snapped. Say a 'move 10 steps' (where 10 can be replaced by any other number) block would have a bump so that similar blocks can be snapped and stacked to make them run together. Stacked can be topped with a rounded blocks called 'Hats' which activates all the commands staked below it if a certain event takes place such as a key press or mouse click.

To add more sophistication in the program, there is a provision of checking states through 'Reporters'. These can be used to report on-screen positions of sprites, check values such as 'Mouse down?' (results in 'True' or 'False' report). Other things to use while programming in sprite include lists to store items, strings to store text and also getting input from the keyboard, useful for taking user response at the run time. Then there are motors, conditional controls (if-then-else), mathematical operators (useful in a simulation to multiply monsters), motion, use of variables and collision detection through sensing to see if a sprite has come into contact with another.

Scratch has a 'Getting Started Guide' along with an online 'Reference Guide' and video tutorials. These resources make the Scratch website a platform for kids to showcase their work as there's an option of registering and sharing the work. The home page displays selected projects in categories such as 'Featured Projects', 'Design Studio', 'Remix', most loved and most viewed. This gives instant start to anyone who wants to know what can be achieved through this new language Scratch.

Computer programming is a whole big world and an area of specialisation at higher levels of education. Without having ample exposure to the concepts of programming, even the 'basic' language taught formally might take time.

But with practice from an early age, programming not only becomes easy, but interesting as well as children know that they can 'control' things at simple or complex level.