> Personally, I'm not sure if "visual programming" itself is introducing anything useful to make education easier. The difficult thing in getting started in wri

> Personally, I'm not sure if "visual programming" itself is introducing anything useful to make education easier. The difficult thing in getting started in writing code isn't writing, I worked with a 6 year old child yesterday, who was exposed to Scratch for the first time. Within the class hour she had several animations running, all controlled from the keyboard. It was all her own work -- I just showed her the ropes and checked in with her from time to time whilst rotating amongst a bunch of kids. What the 'visual' syntax offers in this instance is a discoverable palette of things to play with, and visual cues for what fits with what. That's far harder with a linguistic syntax, particularly for young kids, as you suggest. I'm quite new to teaching programming, so don't have much to go on. I'd say the main problem with Scratch is making a transition from dragging blocks to writing code. I'll be interested to see if the MakeCode/code.org approach is helpful