[cpprototypes]

Just a little bit of programming can be powerful. If I were designing an elementary school course, it would focus on two things:

1) How to clean data. Real world data is always dirty. It mixes strings and ints, has commas and quotes where they shouldn't be, etc. Knowing how to think of data in terms of a standard format and having a plan for exceptions is very important.

2) How to manipulate data. Python, JS, or some other simple dynamic language. Teach how to do functional style programming such as list.forEach(<lambda>) to transform or analyze data.

It's easy to make homework and tests for something like this. And these are fundamental skills. It doesn't matter if Python or JS fades away. It doesn't matter if popular formats change from JSON to something else. It's about teaching how to think about data and how to get it in a form where it's easy and reliable to do analysis or transformations with it.

We don't need to make programming "fun". We need to treat it like algebra. A basic skill that all should learn. But that doesn't mean making web pages or mobile apps. And it also doesn't mean the theory focused CS topics like data structures and algorithms. Just start with learning how to think of data in a standard form like CSV or JSON. And how to use a programming language like JS/Python to do something with the data. After students master these skills, it can be integrated into science classes. Students will know how to write simple scripts to clean up the data from a lab test and analyze it.

[ido]

If you treat it like alegbra, the average school kid will know about as much programming as they know algebra 1 year after graduating (i.e. nothing).

They can learn all the basics of programming by making a game of their choice (with some guidance to make sure they're not over-scoping it).