This is not a repeat of the now infamous \"How do I move the turtle in LOGO?\" R

Question

This is not a repeat of the now infamous "How do I move the turtle in LOGO?"

Recently, I had the following conversation with my five year old daughter:

Daughter: Daddy, do you write programs?

Me: Yes!

Daughter: Daddy, what's a program?

Me: A program is a set of instructions that a computer follows.

Daughter: Daddy, can I write a program too?

Me: Sure!

This got me scrambling to think of a very basic language that a five year old could get some satisfaction from mastering rather quickly. I'm ashamed to admit that the first thing that came to mind was this:

10 INPUT "Tell me a secret" A$
20 PRINT "Wow really? :" A$
30 GOTO 10

That isn't going to hold a five year old's attention for very long and it requires too much of a lecture. However, moving a turtle around and drawing neat pictures might just work.

Sadly, my search for a LOGO interpreter yielded noting but ad ridden sites, flight simulators and a whole bunch of other stuff that I really don't want.

I'm hoping to find a cross platform (Java / Python) LOGO interpreter (dare I call it simulator?) with the following features:

Can save / replay commands (stored programs)
Has an actual turtle
Sound effects are a plus

Have you stumbled across something like this, if so, can you provide a link? I hate to ask a 'shopping' sort of question, but it seemed much better than "Is LOGO appropriate for a five year old?"

Explanation / Answer

You might look at Scratch, a project that takes the same concepts as LOGO and runs with them. It provides a graphical interface for programming that doesn't actually dumb it down, just streamlines it.

It has good built-in graphics and sound capabilities, and a thriving community of submissions and 'remixes'.

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