I am tutoring my son in law and we started with Scratch following cs50. It was thankfully (to me) only 1 lesson before jumping to C. Do you have references for

I am tutoring my son in law and we started with Scratch following cs50. It was thankfully (to me) only 1 lesson before jumping to C. Do you have references for Scratch being more efficient in teaching basic concepts? Or just intuitive because no syntax (which very well may be true)? Scratch is slower interaction for me just because I have muscle memory for text/ide/command-line, but I can see how Scratch would be a lot faster with novices given the pervasive threads and click-to-run.