When you're teaching beginners: what you're talking about won't really make any sense. It's an implementation detail (and a complex one at that). A beginner at

When you're teaching beginners: what you're talking about won't really make any sense. It's an implementation detail (and a complex one at that). A beginner at basic level, that's "what's a variable", "what's a function", "I don't see what the point of a function is". And something like Node -- it's just not a great environment to explain that: it doesn't do much that's interesting, like move stuff around on a screen. You can type stuff into the REPL, and it will spit things back, but that's just going to look like a calculator. Something like Processing, or a simple game engine aimed at beginners, or even making things happen on a web page using JS: that's good, it holds interest.