[TrentLarr]

>I think it’s worth discussing why people like “constrained” systems in a bit more depth, because some of the things I’ve mentioned above are definitely not constrained.

I am the CTO of an edu org, and I've spent a lot of time thinking about this. I would say that from our perspective, it's people aware that they're paralyzed by choice. Unity is a bad choice for kids because there's SO MANY OPTIONS on how to build your game, so many plugins, so many choices!

QBasic was great because it was limited. You had to do a lot of the work yourself, sure, but you could start with a simple text game and not have to think about which input library to use, or font choices, or whatever.

We start kids with Scratch. Most of them build a cute toy and get bored - we break out python (a document with a few imports and a window that opens with a moving sprite included) for the ones who start getting frustrated with the scratch gui (because it's too limiting).