My 4 yr old daughter loves Robot Turtles. That anyone can say that is testament to its awesomeness. The board game format is part of the appeal and allows a kind of interaction (with you) that'd be missing on iPad. But check out code.org for a software alternative with comparable goals.
It's maintained by an indie game studio called Two Lives Left (http://twolivesleft.com), which produced the excellent Cargo-Bot game -- and for that matter, let him get a feel of programming with the latter.
Have you tried DragonBox (iOS) yet? It's not exactly what you are asking for but it takes creativity, logic, and maths and jumbles them all together. My 8yo really enjoyed it.
My 9yo was absolutely thrilled to find an app on iOS with a similar concept to this - I believe it's https://www.draw-your-game.com/. He's thoroughly familiar with ScratchJr so he's already making games there, but I don't think he's quite ready for me to stick him in front of Unity just yet.
Good on the dev for doing something in this space, it'll be appreciated.
I haven't played it much, but I've always felt it would make an interesting iPad game. Seems like it wouldn't be too complex to put an objective-c wrapper around the code.
Not enough comments! It's a real shame the games have stopped coming, but on the other hand the ones that already exist will (I think) remain available.
Opus Magnum is the gateway drug, and it's what I'll often get people to try if they ask me a question like "would I like programming?"
However, many kids don't seem to have (even access to) real computers now so it'd be great if someone would - with permission, of course - port some of them to iOS/Android.
Zachtronic games are great. If you want something you can play on your phone, take a look at Human Resource Machine. Different developer but still a coding game.
There's a Swedish iOS game developer that's quite successful as well, Toca Boca. They're doing games for the small ones and as a father of two I have every single game they've developed on my iPads. Quality work that sits well with my kids.
Speaking about games for children, have you seen http://www.fungooms.com ? In my opinion they are the best and sadlymthe author didn't raise emough backers in kickstartermfor an iOS amd Android port.
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