You're conflating different audiences. Sure, cutesy stuff is counter-productive for a 12 year old, and probably even most 9 year olds. But at 4 years old my ki

You're conflating different audiences. Sure, cutesy stuff is counter-productive for a 12 year old, and probably even most 9 year olds. But at 4 years old my kid was already applying loops and subroutines in LightBot (and later Robot Turtles). At that age kids can already get the thrill of command and begin to play with abstractions, if you give them a domain of discourse that's non-textual.