Yes we actually worked a lot with kids and programming / computers, mostly kids from very poor backgrounds high up in the himalayas. Also I've worked with young programmers for almost 20 years. This project, which you see the very beginning of, is something that is coming to fruition as a result of that experience.
The primary target audience is kids, and the secondary non-programmers who want to get in to data science. The goal is to really make it "for all ages". A previous iteration was tested on target audience and had an encouraging reception, which was the motivation to put more time in to this.
I looked in the notebooks and I don't think programming can be taught like this:
if 1 is 1:
print("hello world")
What is this "if 1 is 1" ? It makes no sense to ask this question, for a kid. It's not clear in English, and if you don't know programming syntax, it is quite mysterious.
We need some kind of game where kids can learn the purpose of if statements and other basic operations in a grounded way, not purely theoretical.
I think the best way to go about teaching programming to kids is to invent some interesting problems they can solve and let them play it out. We can't axiomatically introduce programming at that age.
The whole point of initially using non-sensical (and obvious) examples is 1) to make it as easy as possible to go beyond any doubt with basic numeric programming concepts 2) to allow sinking in the key difference between people and computers, for computers nothing at all is obvious, everything has to be tested. In the later parts, this will become obvious.
For the 'games' you are looking for, there are already many options like scratch. In this series, where these three parts are the start, the idea is to take people of all ages to learn advanced data science in a fun and simplistic way, along the way cementing solid understanding of fundamental numerical computing concepts.
Obviously the later parts will do exactly what you suggest, allow kids to tackle actual problems that are relevant to their lives and their families lives.
The primary target audience is kids, and the secondary non-programmers who want to get in to data science. The goal is to really make it "for all ages". A previous iteration was tested on target audience and had an encouraging reception, which was the motivation to put more time in to this.