My daughter uses scratch and loves it.
My sense is it's good for learning really basic programming concepts (eg, learning a while or for loop controlling a hardware output), and setting up a context for things like Python or Lua later.
My sense is it's good for learning really basic programming concepts (eg, learning a while or for loop controlling a hardware output), and setting up a context for things like Python or Lua later.
Her school has kind of gradually been working through apps and scratch to build up concepts. Some of the early ones were games where you had to program a route out of a maze or something like that by doing things like providing the steps (up down right left, number of each) out. That kind of led to other things, which led to other things.
It sort of built from "tell this robot how to get out of a maze" to "tell your ipad how to do X" where X got gradually more complex over the course of months or a couple of years.