I first started out with scratch, which is pretty awesome and kids can create some pretty awesome (and complex!) projects very quickly. However, I noticed that it is hard to go back and read - the scratch blocks once assembled are hard for the same kid who put them together to quickly read and iterate on.

A concrete example: Deep inside a scratch game, I tried to help a kid update the code for an input method - but it involved moving so many blocks that it was a real pain. Kid coded Scratch is like lego - to tinker with code you need to almost break apart the whole thing.

Text based code, which is what I’m familiar with, is very different - you can tinker with each line, functions are easy to define and call, and other people (and ai assistants!) can read it.

Than I came across raspberry pi’s book on computing pedagogy which had an interesting article saying that kids learn really complex english principles at a young age, and understand how to break up words, what different kinds of words are and how they work (or don’t) together as an sentence. Compared to the english language, the vocabulary a kid needs for coding is super simple.

https://projects.raspberrypi.org/en/pathways/python-intro