So on the one hand, I wrote a Tactix GUI in Java/AWT in my first high school programming class which covered mostly Java with turtle graphics. I can agree that

So on the one hand, I wrote a Tactix GUI in Java/AWT in my first high school programming class which covered mostly Java with turtle graphics. I can agree that kids who want to learn programming want to make games. But that Tactix GUI took me two months of sustained effort, lasting longer than any of the actual class projects. Most of the students struggled to draw a circle. It took weeks for us to get to "implement a method that takes an argument". If you're looking at teaching programming concepts to elementary school children, i.e. to most kids, building applications doesn't seem very likely to me. It takes a long time and small children have poor memories for long-running projects. If the programming is supposed to support elementary math and logic for kids who are getting used to the notion of "variable" in both programming and math contexts, teaching the kids to write the sieve of Eratosthenes or Babylonian algorithm really does seem like the way to go. Not because it teaches them to be good programmers or to like programming, but because it teaches them to think, and they're mostly not going to grow up to be programmers. If, however, you want to entertain the minority of schoolchildren who do like computers and want to learn to program, then using an easy graphics library with good deployment tooling makes sense. Those kids do want to spend two months or so making a game. But that doesn't, to me, seem to be in the spirit of 'proximitysauce's comment.