[yarcob]

Thonny and the turtle package are pretty neat. Not quite as direct as Bret Victors examples, but you have immediate feedback and a debugger.

The Python arcade package is also absolutely fun. We spent a day programming a Snake-clone, and some things like the predefined color names are just hilarious. (But I realised that building a game with a run loop is probably too hard for beginners)

My main problem is the difficulty part you mention: There's a pretty big step before you can do rewarding things like moving the player with keyboard control in a fun way.