Microsoft’s Kodu comes to the PC

For those who haven’t seen Kodu, it’s a visual game development environment originally created for educators and running on the Xbox 360. It uses pie menus, and a game controller, and basically, a graphical language based around trigger events, to allow even children to develop games.

ArsTechnica is reporting that Kodu now runs on the PC as a beta. There’s more details here at Microsoft’s news center.

The inspiration for Kodu came from MacLaurin’s daughter. A few years ago, MacLaurin noticed his daughter, then 3 years old, watching his wife browse her Facebook page. He flashed back to his early experiences with a computer, comparing the passive experience his daughter was having to the coding he did to interact with the machine. It was a sad realization, he said…

…MacLaurin and his Microsoft Research team set out to recapture that magic. Through the basics of programming, they wanted to teach youngsters how they could create new worlds from their imagination. Two years later, Kodu was a hit on Xbox LIVE and was being used in more than 60 educational institutions across the globe to introduce children to programming.