>So compared to that, having a cat walk towards a barn seems like a completely irrelevant layer of entertainment forcefully tailored to the taste of the student

>So compared to that, having a cat walk towards a barn seems like a completely irrelevant layer of entertainment forcefully tailored to the taste of the students, who at best are distracted from the real fun, or at worst presumed to be incapable of understanding why programming itself might be fun. The turtle/cat is a concrete place holder for abstractions like state and variables. Being able to to grasp algebraic variables and other high level abstractions is correlated with Piaget's formal operational stage of cognitive development which most children only begin entering in middle school. You probably could teach a 9 year old programming without these training wheels in the same sense that you could probably teach them algebra.