I mentored a CoderDojo group for Scratch, AppInventor and HTML/JS for a year (two years ago, so details are a little blurry now) and in my humble opinion the "b

I mentored a CoderDojo group for Scratch, AppInventor and HTML/JS for a year (two years ago, so details are a little blurry now) and in my humble opinion the "boxes" or "blocks" are not that good. Not because the idea is bad, but because the implementation is terrible. It's true that children have a hard time typing, but it's not because they can't type fast. The reason is that they don't know how to delete, navigate using keys, or what tab and intro are supposed to do. The boxes are painful to manage. The only advantage is that they can use them with the mouse, that they seem to be much more familiar than with the keyboard. Some pitfalls: * Not obvious what kind of item should go in every placeholder. * You need to learn in what tab page is every kind of item. * As soon as the program is bigger than a simple proof of concept, it's difficult to read, understand or modify. * There is some model for moving stuff around the screen that it's not very intuitive and you can't easily choose an alternative. * The event model is probably not what a beginner should start with. A better approach would be to use the keyboard, at least to do the same as with the mouse. Every pro knows that keyboard is way better. Don't let the cursor go out of boxes maybe. I've sit on the idea of making such an editor in JS for a year... anytime soon :-) Oh and BTW, the children did just fine with JavaScript, once they learned keyboard basics.