Javascript has HUGE barriers compared to Visual Basic. Picture who you're teaching. These aren't generally kids who know anything about programming. They're

Javascript has HUGE barriers compared to Visual Basic. Picture who you're teaching. These aren't generally kids who know anything about programming. They're kids who have never seen anything even similar to programming before. In fact, the vast majority of them probably don't even want to be there. So you teach Visual Basic, because it has less "gotchas" than Javascript, it reads more like english, it has less intimidating symbols, it can be made to be strongly typed so that they'll receive feedback at compile time, it comes with a powerful WYSIWYG tool built into the IDE, and it has a vast, VAST suit of powerful first and third party libraries that can make the kids feel like they're performing magic. Visual Basic gets shit on a lot by people, and perhaps justifiably in the business world - but in the teaching world (especially when you're teaching people who are ignorant of and generally apathetic to the subject matter), there are few languages that compare to it favorably.