I'm preparing to introduce Vito to programming this coming year. I was planning to start with visual based programming or block based programming such as Scratch which Mavi used in his CoderDojo classes in the past years. But based on my recent research there are already a lot of kids toys these days that can be programmed with visual blocks. One class of toys make use of the BBC Microbit Makecode programming blocks. So for a more hands-on method to introducing or experiencing programming we plan to use some of the toys listed below.
I hope this list may be useful to you so your students can have a fun way to learn and be introduced to programming. And yes, these Programmable Robot toys can be good Christmas presents as well!!!