A dad’s innovative idea to teach kids computer programming fundamentals has received a boost from promotional products software maker Essent.

Dan Shapiro, of Seattle, took a leave from Google to create the Robot Turtles board game and has found a torrent of support on the fundraising network Kickstarter.

"Essent backed this project because we love technology and the good it can do. Helping teach kids the fundamentals of programming to one day empower their own innovation is a no-brainer,” Essent CEO Eric Alessi said.

Robot Turtles has children 3 to 8 years old use cards to tell the Turtle Mover, an adult, how to move turtles on the board. The Turtle Mover is like a computer, Shapiro reasons, and the cards are the coding. The programmer kids use their finite coding cards to tell the computer adult how to move the turtles toward complex goals -- in this case, Robot Jewels.

"I'm a father of four year old twins. Teaching them to program a computer is the single greatest superpower I can give them,” Shapiro says on his Kickstarter page. "I don’t think I’m alone in believing that programming literacy is going to be key to our children’s future.”

Essent previously used Kickstarter to support +Pool, a plan to turn part of the Hudson River off of New York City into a clean, swimmable pool.