I think it would be a shame *not* to put many things in front of
children, during the super-brain-sponge years, as unpressured and
unstructured play, and see what interests them, and answer their
questions, and occasionally inject new things they can do with it.
Most programming is too abstract for kids so young, but if they are
using a PC/tablet, or they see you doing it, they will probably want to
start playing with it, and making it do things. You could then load up
some kind of concrete child-oriented graphic/music platform (maybe from
Racket, or from Squeak or Scratch), and help them get started playing
with that.
My non-expert inclination, which I've seen work very well, anecdotally,
is to let their natural curiosity (what they try to do, what they ask)
guide things, and occasionally inject a new idea for some thing they
might want to do but hadn't already discovered on their own.
For example, when a 5yo was playing with my professional DSLR camera, it
was mostly self-directed play, but, in addition to answering her
questions as she went, I'd occasionally inject concepts like that she
could also "make things closer" (focal length), "make some things fuzzy"
(depth of field), "make the sky blue" and "see through the reflection"
(polarizer), and let her do everything like lens and filter changes
(only a little optics damage happened), and let her self-direct whether
and how she played with all of that. She was delighted, doing things
like making her mom fuzzy, and, very quickly, she was integrating
multiple DSLR mechanics at once, just as play, without being prompted to
integrate them.
I figure that kids get enough structure in school already, that it's
safe to focus on self-directed play outside of school, and let the
experts handle structure for a while. Though I don't have experience
with when and how to introduce more structure and push most abstract
concepts, outside of school.
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