Well depends what do you want to teach :) I personally was introduced to programming as a hobby when I was 10y old, in an after-school class, where we used vis

Well depends what do you want to teach :) I personally was introduced to programming as a hobby when I was 10y old, in an after-school class, where we used visual basic for applications. This was early 2000's and VBA editor bundled with every Office was suprisingly decent, and I remember quite fondly creatin random poem-generators spamming endless streams of message boxes :D So, if they manage to make their way around some thing ordinary but complex such as spreadsheet/presentation editor, I don't think bloated IDE's would be too much of a hinderance. So even though in principle, I like the simplicity of repl for teaching somebody, my afternoon class 15 years ago didn't have problem with the "high cognitive load" :) Regarding blender ... If you want to teach them basics of graphics/3d modeling first and then showcase the basic, and make them interactive with its drag&drop/node-based actor model ... it might be fun. But I haven't used blender in more than 5 years, so I don't really know, how much it supports the "game-dev-teaching" angle.