Slightly OT: Do people like learning/teaching with scratch? To me it looks like they identified using the keyboard as the hard part of programming and removed that obstacle. It makes programs very tall and skinny so I find them harder to understand.

For many, the tangibility of a real physical thing that interacts with the world and the constructivist learn-by-play approach is worth the $129.

The toy doesn’t provide the learning — it provides the motivation.

The kids with parents who buy them the nice robots learn less and lose out in the long run. A used ThinkPad(well under $100) and an active Internet connection is all anyone needs get started.

I had internet access since I was about 10, used the internet constantly though my teenage years, and did great in math and science in school (winning contests and the like). I was also interested in computing and thought it would be cool to know how to code. I even tried to follow some tutorials to learn, but I guess they didn’t explain the tooling so I never managed to run my code. I was missing some tiny experience of running a compiler that would change coding from a thing I’d read about to a thing I’d actually do. I didn’t actually learn to code until I took a computer science class in college. I took it up quickly, and have since had a very good career as a software engineer.

I had the hardware, the aptitude, the interest, and the free time, but it just didn’t happen until I was in the right environment to give me a bit of initial hand-holding. I guess my point is, don’t just throw your kid in front of a computer and assume they will learn to code. They might end up writing fanfiction, playing an MMO, or trolling on 4chan instead.

Got lucky. Never did all these things.

But I got so interested in game programming that eventually a project struck with me and I kept with it and wrote code more than ten lines long.

The Ruby programming language and a little book(don't remember at the moment) from the public library was my gateway drug.

As other commenters have pointed out, the kids (and adults) in this picture may simply not have the technical skills to even get started.

As a child, I went to the library, got a book on programming and was dying to learn how to do it but didn't manage to compile a single program for years.

A programming app, or a programming robot, or some other tailor made solution may well be the right solution for some of these kids.

If I have to read about Scratch in a forum specialized in software development then I would have never found it on my own.

In Central Europe it’s relatively common to have schools and university organizing Scratch workshops for kids. Local hackerspaces or Linux user groups help organize that kind of event all the time. There are a lot of small initiatives like this if you look around for workshops targeting kids.