Despite a wealth of tutorials for setting up and writing code for the ESP8266 WiFi module, there has not been much of anything on programming this cheap wireless module with the Arduino IDE ...

The Arduino is an excellent first embedded development kit, provides a great introduction to electronics, and has the potential to get children into programming. [David] thinks throwing C at non-pr… ...

For beginners learning to program Arduinos, a web-based, fully networked developer environment called Codebender could drastically reduce the learning curve.