The result of a partnership between the MIT Media Lab, Tufts University and Playful Invention Company (PICO), ScratchJr was created for children who are too young to use the original Scratch programming language, which older children have been using to code.
Forbes’ Jordan Shapiro said that he gave his 6-year-old son his iPad to play with with Scratch Jr loaded, and his son started playing with it immediately, “creating stories through an interface that teaches the basics of coding.”
Speaking to Shapiro about the app, one of the creators, Mitchel Resnick, said, “We teamed up with Marina Bers, a professor of child development at Tufts University, and we redesigned the Scratch interface and programming language to make them developmentally appropriate for younger children, carefully designing features to match young children’s cognitive, personal, social, and emotional development.”
Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jordans...-year-old-can-learn-to-code-with-an-ipad-app/