[shrugger]

That is exactly true!

I have experience teaching kids Lua, and with the right metaphors and a little bit of backtracking and foundation-building, even complicated ideas like emulating classes and single inheritance can be understood and even implemented by young students.

If I taught them lua reserved keywords, and a couple little math tricks here and there, they usually would all bunch up everything into a couple huge functions, and their game would (sort-of) work but be impossible to reason about, and very painful to extend.

Introducing objects as a way to represent things that they want the game to do (draw things, shoot things, eat things, etc), it becomes clear to them that there is merit in structuring programs with objects beyond "shrugger says to do it like this!"

OOP on its own doesn't make much sense. You can't teach someone to drive stick shift if they don't know what a car is. Maybe you could, but that's probably even worse.