I teach kids from 6 to 12 years with Scratch (and other tools) in my spare time. If you are a developer you should try it out. It's amazing how creative kids are with a tool like Scratch. My programming career started with Flash 4 and allowed me to work with sound, audio and animations together with the possibility to program and to easily distribute it (there was a single swf file).

Scratch is like the distilled version of it optimized for kids. I would have loved it as a kid and I see how natural children can work with it. Mitchel Resnick and his team did a great job with Scratch and it's amazing to finally see it working in HTML5 - after being a Flash based application.

Teaching coding to kids is important and as a developer it's easy to say so. Some day I made the decision to think about the why to better explain people why I do the teaching. The end product was a 25min talk I gave at the JSConf EU 2018 in Berlin. Maybe that's of interest for parents reading here about Scratch and of course fellow developers interested in teaching coding to kids.

https://youtu.be/t0m5rrKKMOA (About Coding Kids and Screaming Carrots — JSConf EU 2018)

Here the slides and all information I mentioned in the talk: https://github.com/georgiee/coding-for-kids

My summary why a kid should learn coding:

  > It's about teaching kids to be producer instead of a consumer 
  > so they can build their own games, tell their own stories 
  > and create their own music.