Yesterday at CES Robbie Bach – president of the entertainment & devices division at Microsoft – presented a software named Kodu (formerly known as “Boku”) which will allow kids and adults to create their own games using their XBox360 and without learning a  difficult programming language. They use visual abstractions to give people another perspective on programming and – with that – an easier access. For several years researches work on topics like end-user programming (perhaps you remember Squeak or Alice?) and in Spring 2009 we will see what Microsoft`s vision of this research area is. Besides the challenge of implementing visual programming logics, the user interface is what definetly excites me the most about these news, cause it shall all be controlled by a XBox pad.

Really impressive is the demo of a 12-year old girl at CES using Kodu (see video below, thx Youtube).