I can't comment too much on this, except to say that it did cause me to recall something from my early childhood. I remembered that in the first grade of eleme

I can't comment too much on this, except to say that it did cause me to recall something from my early childhood. I remembered that in the first grade of elementary school, when I was 6 years old, that we used these workbooks with tear out pages to do these "math" problems. Simple addition and subtraction, IIRC. But these workbooks didn't use numbers and symbols; instead quantities were shown by fixed objects (like coins, or other images), symbols were replaced by something else, but I don't recall exactly what (maybe simple words - so not completely "text free"). On a different note - a few years ago my wife asked me to look over a friend's child's homework, to try to figure out how to do the problems, and what the answers were, because her child was having problems doing the homework, and neither she nor my wife could figure it out (neither are very math fluent). I looked at it - and at first it was "gibberish". There were some "standard" symbols for multiplication and addition, subtraction and the like. But everything else was symbols. Like, there'd be a problem that visually was something like "circle + ? = triangle" or "2 square + 3 triangle = ?" (I may be mis-remembering things, too). It was very confusing, but fortunately the worksheet (which was all I had) had a couple of "example problems" and their solutions included. I studied things for a bit, then it dawned on me: It was algebra - but it was being taught with symbols instead of numbers, and the solution (and how to arrive at it) was pretty simple to understand, once this was realized. In short, numbers are symbols (hey, I'm not a big math whiz myself - I know just enough to blow my foot off) - so it made sense that swapping these out wasn't that big of a deal, provided you had some base knowledge about the rules (which were provided by the examples). I was able to figure the problems out, then write down how things worked for her (and her child) to read and understand. AFAIK, the homework was completed and turned in with correct answers. At the time, her child was probably in the 4th or 5th grade, and it was interesting to me that the school was using such a system to teach algebra at an earlier age than what I recall having learned it (my first real algebra class wasn't until 7th grade, though in elementary school in 5th and 6th grades we had been doing some of the basics beforehand - I guess for "prep" for the coming years). So, in the case of coding, I can see how this idea of starting with "abstract icons" (somewhat) to represent certain coding statements and ideas - and gradually phasing in text - seems like something that should work (and they seem to prove that it does, too). Oh - another early example from when I was younger; arguably I first started to "program" when I got my first programmable toy - a Milton Bradley Big Trak. It's keypad used mostly symbols (plus some numbers) - but had other symbols for other actions...hmm.