I'll add that if you are looking at books, to make sure that they are Scratch 3 not Scratch 2 (most of the books out there are still Scratch 2). I've got lots

I'll add that if you are looking at books, to make sure that they are Scratch 3 not Scratch 2 (most of the books out there are still Scratch 2). I've got lots of experience with kids with Scratch (via my kids, and running a Code Club and CoderDojo - the Raspberry Pi Foundation has quite a few projects) and went to this year's Scratch Europe conference. As well as the advantages of being a visual programming language (so younger kids who struggle with typing don't get frustrated, and no syntax errors!), it does make it extremely easy to do visual stuff, moving sprites etc. to do things like make games which means that kids can do fun stuff very quickly. I do wish it made it a bit easier to introduce slightly more advanced programming concepts though. You have to do a lot of stuff via broadcasting messages and cloning which gets really messy when you try and do anything complicated, and although sprites are objects, it doesn't map as nicely onto conventional object-orientation as I would like for example.