Here's how teaching kids goes without scratch: "This is python, we use it to do professional development work. Here's VS code, we use it to do professional dev

Here's how teaching kids goes without scratch: "This is python, we use it to do professional development work. Here's VS code, we use it to do professional development work. Let's learn them." 6 year olds: "Okay!" Proceeds to mangle whitespace, variable names, scope, indexing, ==, forgets :, doesn't understand what def is, even after they get all that the program is basically "hello world" print to console. 6 year olds: "Programming is hard and frustrating with little payoff, I don't want to do this anymore" The one 6 year who who will grow up to be a greybeard sysadmin "This stuff is great! I can't wait to learn more!" Teachers: "I have no idea what I'm doing, the devs keep saying how Python is supposed to be easy and it's built for learning, but I'm just as confused as the kids." -- Here's how teaching kids goes with scratch: "This is scratch, you snape these colored shapes together and they do things like make this character move" 6 year olds: "Okay!" Proceeds to make games and stories with graphics, sounds and interaction, which they share with their friends, fully editable and runnable in a web environment with zero setup: https://scratch.mit.edu https://scratch.mit.edu 6 year olds: "Wow programming is fun! I can't wait to learn more!" The one 6 year who who will grow up to be a greybeard sysadmin "I agree this stuff is great! I can't wait to learn more!" Teachers: "It wasn't hard to get up and running with scratch, it's very easy to teach and I get it."