In undergrad I worked with this group for a while: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/andru/papers/reduct-chi17/ http://www.cs.cornell.edu/andru/papers/reduct-chi17/ Th

In undergrad I worked with this group for a while: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/andru/papers/reduct-chi17/ http://www.cs.cornell.edu/andru/papers/reduct-chi17/ They took the basic idea of Scratch, then made it into more of a game with levels, each level being a puzzle to (implicitly) teach or test programming concepts. As you progressed it'd introduce new syntax, while slowly "fading" more familiar syntax towards actual JavaScript code (though retaining the block/GUI-based interface). We did some more work on further iterations but I'm not sure what became of it all.