This year I became a volunteer at Coding Pirates, a Danish non-profit organization that tries to help kids to understand technology so they can create and not just consume.
There are a few challenges that you are going to meet when you try to teach kids to code. Mostly mathematical/logical concepts but also language based (English keywords).
Scratch, developed by MIT, seems to solve these issues but tends to become boring in the long run. I use to say that coding in Scratch is a bit like reading a "picture book".
We seem to face a challenge when we want to transition the children from reading "picture books" to "read books", as many of the technologies used by us grown ups, aren't that user-friendly as we think they are.
In this talk we will showcase a few tentatives on how to make code fun and more intuitive for children and who knows, maybe also for grown ups. In order to achieve this, we will be using a few of Microsoft Tools & Azure Cloud services.