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On 25-Apr-17 14:15, Andrew Starks wrote:
Have you played with Scratch?https://scratch.mit.edu/

Actually, I co-wrote a couple of Scratch-centered school books for primary school :-)

http://deagostiniscuola.deascuola.it/home?layout=search&idmarchio=4&idt=coding&idl=0

They even include a couple of small graphics adventures (my specialty, sort of). Here is a mini-orrery without trigonometry:

https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/62467626/

After hating the version of LabView that came with the Lego Mindstorm, I
was ready to hate on Scratch, as well.

Eh eh... looks like I was not alone :-)

The drag and drop interface for it
works really well. My 8 year old (whom I decided does not need to start
with C) loves it.  It has the neat ability to let you create and manipulate
graphics (lines and pens and such). Also, it's event driven, so you can
create reasonable games. It even has built in collision detection!

Scratch is very easy and captivating to start with, but is not without flaws: a broken object model and more than a few residuals from a 1980's mindframe. On the other hand it offers a powerful message-passing mechanism between independent tasks (I usually explain it as "You shout and all the other children listen").

--
  Enrico