Pascal killed my interest in programming for a while as it was force fed in both high school and earlier collage years. Reflecting back, it was the pessimistic approach to teaching of just pushing math problems via programming.
Much later however, I started really appreciating Pascal, both as a teaching language and as a multiplatform language.
PeaZip, CudaText, Transmission Remote GUI, UltraStar Deluxe and plenty others are written in FreePascal.
At the time, I remember pascal feeling like "real programming". The programs were compiled and they operated at various levels of abstraction, from pointers up through advanced data structures and interfaces/ADTs. I didn't see Scheme as more than a toy, which was partly because the MIT Scheme implementation was just an interpreter. And I hated Basic and still do.
Pascal was great because it was pretty easy to learn and somewhat consistent. Its most annoying feature, semicolon-as-separator, was easily handled by the terrific Think pascal editor.
In its time, Pascal was a great choice. There were real-world things that you could do immediately using Think Pascal and Turbo Pascal. Making the switch to C and Unix wasn't simple but probably easier than starting with Basic. However, I was left with a bias towards wordy languages like Pascal, Ada and Modula-3 that took a while to get over :)
I could write an article about each of these features, but in summary they each are powerful and help users write more useful programming code when leveraged correctly.
Pascal is way too verbose and boilerplate-ly compared to that.
I believe the right approach to programming is graphics for kids.
My mom taught programming in the early 80s. She took a course at the nearby community college, and a year later, was teaching the course. Her background was... high school math teacher. She said: "Programming is just math, a program is like a proof." Fortunately I loved math and proofs, so that way of thinking wasn't an obstacle for me. Clearly we know differently now.
they could approach the same math from the other side, by starting to write games. and gradually come to game math. that would be more interesting, and then it would become obvious why one may need some math while programming.
Angle trisection tools. https://www.instructables.com/The-Tomahawk-an-Angle-Trisecti... First AA proof I learned: Cannot trisect an angle with ruler and compass.
> However it is imperfect: for it is not yet delicious.
I guess it depends on the school and people there to create a fun but educational culture.