Meet Robot Turtles: the game that helps kids code

Dan Shapiro has made his mark as a Seattle software entrepreneur, creating startups such as Ontela and Sparkbuy.

Now, Shapiro, who is on leave from Google, is turning his attention to board games. That’s right.

Shapiro, the father of 4-year-old twins, is creating a new board game called Robot Turtles, which he notes “sneakily teaches programming fundamentals” to those between the ages of three to eight. In fact, the inspiration for the game came directly from Shapiro’s own childhood, since he learned the Logo programming language(known in part for its use of Turtle graphics) at age 7.