[namaria]

I'm conflicted on such sandboxed approaches. On one hand it makes sense to shield learners from more frustrating things like grokking actual software artifacts, systems design problems and interfaces. On the other hand, programming logic per se is pretty damned simple, shouldn't take a hundred slides to impart, and the real challenge is actually figuring out interfaces and artifacts.

If we create the expectation that it's all about logic and that the environment should automagically work, aren't we crippling learners? How can someone design or debug if they don't know how things actually fit together behind the scenes?