Are you teaching someone Java? Do you know anyone who is taking an introductory training in Java? Do you want your 5 year old kid to start on Java? If yes, then you can help them further by introducing to free interactive IDEs made just for this purpose 🙂

This Oracle page has a list of cool IDEs, available for free and targeted at Java aspirants of various age-groups. Scratch for example is targeted at age-group 5-15 and helps learn java using animations and games. Alice provides a similar drag-and-drop 3D development environment. Bluej provides visual tools to write Java programs. Greenfoot, which calls its Projects as “Scenarios” has a scenario like the one shown below where you can create “Leaf” instances to feed to a wandering Wombat. Another such IDE called Judo is available at sourceforge.

This page at Dzone has links for other cool stuff to teach Programming to kids.