> On the one hand it feels obvious that this kind of lobotomized programming experience will be stultifying. As someone who learned to program in Scratch many

> On the one hand it feels obvious that this kind of lobotomized programming experience will be stultifying. As someone who learned to program in Scratch many years ago, don't worry about it. I've written in languages from Python to Assembly, I've worked professionally as a programmer, etc. It's fine. As far as I can tell, the best way to teach someone to program is to enable them to pursue their own projects and to help them when they get stuck before they get so frustrated they give up. (Maybe there are learning styles I'm not aware of, this is true of myself and of people I've met.) When I meet people who want to program but can't (which has happened approximately twice, one of them did come back to programming after a few years & succeeded), it seems to be because they didn't have access to sufficient support, and stupid issues (especially development environment issues) wore them down. Scratch is a tremendous help in both respects. It comes out of the box which cool stuff to do (eg, I made dumb games and animated little movies). It's simple enough for nonprogrammer adults (like teachers) to learn and help debug.