There's a new crop of coding toys for techie tykes

Not everyone is excited about pushing first-graders to learn the nuts and bolts of how computers work. Some critics believe that too much technology too early can interfere with a child’s natural development; others warn that pushing advanced concepts on younger kids could frustrate them and turn them off computer science completely. “Kids need that immediate reward.” But these kinds of toys are so new that there’s no way to know if they actually stimulate long-term interest in coding or whether they affect healthy brain development. “Kids need to directly experience things, to invent purely out of their imagination without any preprocessed experience,” says Karen Sobel Lojeski, a Stony Brook University child-development researcher with a computer-science background. There’s no robot here, just a tray in which kids can place tiles representing commands that move a character around an associated tablet-based video game called “Cork the Volcano.” If kids don’t get it right the first time, they can switch out the tiles and run the program again.