Scratch is a big deal
I like Scratch - my kid uses it and I worked briefly with the guy who made Blockly, the underlying visual programming toolkit - but the programming environment makes many things far too complicated with its singular focus on sprites.<p>It&#x27;s very, very difficult to do things as simple as display a number on screen. My 7yo was making a number guessing game, and to display a two-digit number we had to make two sprites that had 10 &quot;costumes&quot; (0-9) then do modular math to select the costume for each digit. Sprites also have their own code, and if you duplicate one and edit the code the edits don&#x27;t apply to the duplicate - so there&#x27;s no user library or abstraction power at all.<p>This made dealing with Scratch far more complex and time-consuming than the logic of the game my kid was making, which is the exact opposite of what you want in a learning environment. I don&#x27;t really want to focus on the idiosyncrasies of Scratch when teaching programming.<p>Some simple text and drawing commands, user-defined functions, and a library would go a huge way towards making Scratch simpler. There are some other Blockly-based environments that may have this... but they&#x27;re not as popular.