So, teach them ARM9/Arduino/PIC/X86/other assembly? (I wonder how many people here as kids first learned to program by typing in assembly programs from magazines.)
The point here is to teach children (not just hacker wiz kids) some basic premises of programming without making it about programming.
It's pretty clever IMHO and it allow children to create exactly the world they want to create whether that is vampires or bunny land.
True, but the fact that we used to do it also doesn't mean that it must be broken. I doubt many of would be better programmers if we had a more child-friendly programming language to learn when we were young.
Think of this as php for children. An easy to use forgiving environment that welcome everyone not just the few who have the stamina and interest to learn assembler.
And think of this as the future of programming languages as they will become more and more abstracted from the core.
Those who want to dig deeper can.