Scratch is great for understanding a lot of the concepts like properties, branching and loops but IMO goes too far towards the visual side. I liked the paradigm

Scratch is great for understanding a lot of the concepts like properties, branching and loops but IMO goes too far towards the visual side. I liked the paradigm of "perform the action on the object" then "write the code in the container" that gets created or linked. We didn't really have formal "user stories" back then but programming essentially walked you through the "when I ... then ..." process.