One of my kids started with Codea on an iPad 1 (and it still runs on that ancient hardware today!) and is quite pleased to be able to tell people she can code i

One of my kids started with Codea on an iPad 1 (and it still runs on that ancient hardware today!) and is quite pleased to be able to tell people she can code in Lua. Overall, it's extremely well done. However, I think it gets hard to work through high-level logic -- you start off writing code in the draw() function, doing things once per frame draw... getting to a more abstracted level has been difficult in Codea. However, her school does some Scratch every so often, and she's taken to that too. Scratch exposes lots of levels of abstraction, and the visual editor approach makes it easy to experiment with different ways of doing things. She's done several school projects as Scratch games. (Which, to me, is way better than gluing crap to pasteboard.) I've tried to get her started in Unity -- I teach a Unity class to new hires at work -- but it's been uphill. Too abstract, too conceptual, too much surface area. And C# has too much syntax that gets in her way. Lua is a better language for her. But Scratch is even better: no syntax, just ideas. Also, Scratch has a lot of localizations. So, give Scratch a try!