I will tag along here - with some details on my experience as well as looking for better answers. Things like Scratch, Python+Pygames etc make the initial hell

I will tag along here - with some details on my experience as well as looking for better answers. Things like Scratch, Python+Pygames etc make the initial hello-world style apps too easy and then there is a gigantic learning curve for anything better. It is very hard to keep the motivation going. We tried codehs.com . Kids spend an excruciating amount of time trying to make the print statement's literal output match with whatever the code-checker is expecting. It is frustrating even for me to try to debug their code. I feel any kid who is learning coding without an IDE such as VsCode will get discouraged from this field. I am just about to start a session for 8th grade graduates to introduce them to 'advent of code'. At least here, the right answer is just a number. No more worrying about the quote character being in unicode or text. The one that got real interest from my students was a world-puzzle solver - to cheat the phone game "LetterPress" (free on iPhone and Android). They finally understood how a bot (official bot that you play against) could be so smart. I am still on the lookout for such good examples that they can actually use in real life.