I'm a great believer in getting kids to code early - after all, I'm of that generation that was taught
10 PRINT "HELLO"
20 GOTO 10at the age of 9. There are quite a few approaches to teaching today's kids in an engaging way, but I'm a bit wary of the sandbox solutions that teach kids things like how to navigate a virtual thingie around the screen, or lets them create things in a limited virtual world. I don't think kids will easily make the leap between these sort of games to seeing the full potential of programming - they're too limited and have no context for the kids. It's just another game.
Kids need to understand how programming fits into their world, they need to understand the context of coding, if they're going to fall in love with it.