One of the things we're often grousing about in the computing education and games education communities is programming literacy (some people call this procedural literacy, but I reserve that phrase for a more general concept of literacy, more on this another time).

Raph Koster points us to Quite Basic, a new tool that offers a lightweight, easily accessible programming environment right inside a web page. And even better, it's the BASIC that we once booted and loved. Quite features a text and canvas output space, a happy text area for typing your code, and a little mini debugger. Slick stuff. You can certainly write games in it, and a few are already there as sample projects, including Pong, pictured at right.