My opinion on Scala is that while it's a much nicer language than Java, it's going to be quite difficult to pick up unless you have previous programming experie

My opinion on Scala is that while it's a much nicer language than Java, it's going to be quite difficult to pick up unless you have previous programming experience in at least one of Java or an ML-like language. If this can successfully teach kids Scala as a first language I'm very, very impressed.