It's not designed for the purpose of being beginner friendly, afaik. But the difficulties your son had are necessary. If it weren't those particular things it

It's not designed for the purpose of being beginner friendly, afaik. But the difficulties your son had are necessary. If it weren't those particular things it would have been others. You might want to make things as easy for him as possible, but that's not learning. If my memory is right, the Lua tutorial mentions early on that any variable that hasn't been assigned a value is nil. The typo, the confusion, and then the realization was the act of learning something on a deeper level than you had understood it before. Going further, when accessing that variable, weren't you indexing _G by accident? Indexing a table with a key that doesn't have a value associated with it returns nil, which makes sense. That thing that makes sense has consequences that can catch you off guard. Looking for a frictionless way to learn something is folly, because the friction comes from the thing you're trying to learn itself.