I've played around in Pharo which should be similar to Squeak and would not recommend for kids. Scratch or Python should work. Smalltalk's complete focus on obj

I've played around in Pharo which should be similar to Squeak and would not recommend for kids. Scratch or Python should work. Smalltalk's complete focus on objects will likely confuse kids. I find the object inspector and the class browser and the whole class heirarchy thing is only useful after you know all the basics. I'm also a big fan of open source, but it sounds like the license cost here was negligible and the important part is that the kids learn the concepts. They can always take that knowledge home and program in whatever tools they want.