The advantage of Scratch is that the kids don't need to type the commands. Seems like a trivial thing, but it makes a ton of difference. Imagine teaching a chi

The advantage of Scratch is that the kids don't need to type the commands. Seems like a trivial thing, but it makes a ton of difference. Imagine teaching a child who needs on average 10 seconds to find a key on the keyboard. That makes 6 keys per minute, 270 keys per 45-minute lesson. But that's an upper bound, because the kids can't spend the whole lesson typing (they also need to be told what to do), and of course they are not going to get everything right on the first try. Also, small kids are going to make a lot of typos everywhere. What kind of a program can you type using less than hundred characters? This problem magically disappears when you use Scratch. For little kids, it makes a big difference.