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Learning to program is fun, and there’s never been a better time to get started. The key to programming is learning how to think in the right way computers will do what you tell them, even if it doesn’t make sense. These apps will teach you how to get your brain into the right mode.

CARGO-BOT (Free, iPad), you instruct a crane to move crates You give the crane all its instructions in advance (by dragging little icons around), and it follows them one at a time. In this fashion you learn programming concepts such as repeating a shorter sequence of actions, or only performing a sequence when a box is present.

HOPSCOTCH (Free, Universal) lets you make your own programs by placing characters on the screen, then adding rules such as “When girl is tapped, move forward.” By building these rules, you can make simple games or interactive scenes. Hopscotch includes puzzles to solve, and video tutorials that show you how to make some example games.

TYNKER (Free, iPad) is similar to Hopscotch, because they’re both inspired by the educational programming language Scratch. They use the same approach of dragging commands into the right order. Tynker’s tutorials are both excellent and numerous, but due to Tynker’s additional functionality over Hopscotch, it may be necessary for beginners to start with the tutorials rather than the free creation mode.

HAKITZU ELITE: ROBOT HACKERS Free, Universal is a robot fighting game. You write short programs to issue orders to your robots. You start by choosing icons from a menu to add commands to your program, but as you move through the challenges you graduate to typing the program directly. Hakitzu’s extensive tutorials never leave you wondering what to type, but it can be fiddly entering all the required punctuation using the on-screen keyboard.

CODECADEMY: CODE HOUR (Free,Universal) gets you to “fill in the blanks” of short programs, in order to learn one concept at a time. There’s helpful text at the top of the screen explaining the concept behind what you’re doing, and if you get things wrong it gives you a clear explanation. In all, it takes one hour. This is Codecademy’s only app, but it has other courses to try online.

CODEA SCRATCHPAD ($4.99, iPad) teaches you Lua, a language used in many published games. However, there’s no tutorial the “Getting Started” guide just links you to the Codea wiki. If you would rather eschew beginner-focused apps and learn a professional language, arm yourself with a book on Lua and dive in but you’ll need to be a selfmotivated learner. Its big brother, Codea, lets you turn your programs into apps for the App Store, too.