I may have biased it, but she found the experience more engaging than MIT Scratch (which is also very good).
When kids and newbies engage with a product so easily (think git before github), you suddenly vastly increase the userbase.
However, when we talk to some of the kids coming to Repl.it from Scratch they often say something along the lines of Scratch is an "adult's idea of what kids might like". I think some kids want to feel like hackers and like they're doing "the real thing."
To that end we're working on a framework that has similar semantics to Scratch but is actually Python: https://github.com/replit/play
BTW: a 5 year old learning Clojure is fascinating. I hope you write about that sometime.
I teach a low-impact, almost impossible to fail programming elective to HS students. We start with a fork of Scratch, and we eventually move to Python. The above is generally the response of my students as well. Scratch is a nice, gentle introduction, but then it becomes more tedious clicking through categories, dragging-and-dropping, and maintaining an organized environment with larger assignments. I'm inclined to agree. Also transferring concepts from Scratch to a terminal language doesn't click for most students. I'm still working on bettering my lesson plans in that aspect.
I do want to counter with something positive about these visual implementations though. I think boot strapping the course would be 10 times harder with just a terminal language.
It's uses similar language and a Scratch-like execution model, so you can do things like this:
face = play.new_text('^.^', font_size=100)
@face.when_clicked
async def do():
face.words = '*o*'
await play.timer(seconds=1)
face.words = '^.^'Can you share the repl or add some more detail please on how was it better than traditional methods
Let's be clear that for a 5 year old, being able to substitute numbers in (+ 2 3) and seeing the results is displayed on the screen is pretty cool. And for my 3-year-old, just typing his name (after I tell him which keys to press) is magical.