[jerome-jh]

Remembering the very first course I received at 9 y.o. (logo with turtle) the pleasure came from seeing the actual output of the program on the screen: a drawing. Remembering my first C course at 20, whose program was a one liner designed on purpose for us to understand nothing: don't be afraid to tell "I cannot explain you that now" (e.g. why #include). Today if I had to choose a language/platform to teach coding, that would be the Arduino. Simple system, visible output, simple language although perfectly well formed C++.

[jerome-jh]

Going on with my Arduino idea: when they have enough of C you can do some assembly. You can teach interrupt handling, the source of all concurrency on a single core, in C or asm. You can do communication on an unreliable link (2 boards & LEDs), sensor conditioning. A wheeled robot may help some students "seeing the world from the computer eyes", although they may be a bit too old for that.

Of course data structures are best taught in C on a desktop. Functional programming is certainly interesting but further apart from how a modern computer works.

During my studies I even did opcode programming on antic 8085 dev boards, with a 20 keys keyboard (hex digits, reset, run, memory up/down). You can't imagine how much fun that was, akin to woodworking or pottery. That certainly grounded a number of ideas on programming, that may look otherwise mystic to students.