The How to Design Programs with Racket seems to be a very good balance of letting kids work with picture and things that are visually rewarding while not insula

The How to Design Programs with Racket seems to be a very good balance of letting kids work with picture and things that are visually rewarding while not insulating them from writing code. Our family avoided Scratch for many of the same reasons the author gave. Instead we focused on typing and math and introduced programming when typing out all of your code wasn't going to be frustrated by their typing speed. How to Code: Simple Data with EdX is a very nice introduction to that approach of teaching programming.