[darepublic]

First off I love this analog programming idea. I have young children who I would love to try this out with.

Maybe missed something in skimming through the blog post but seems like primarily it's simulating doing up/down/left/right and navigating a character through a maze. For some reason this seems to be the most popular approach for apps that teach kids programming.

i.e. https://kodable.com, which one of my kids is into and https://codecombat.com, which has been around for a while now.

I think this paradigm (navigating a character using "move" function invocations) is good but kind of exhausts its usefulness after a while. I question whether my daughter learns coding this way or just is playing a turn based top down platformer. The most code like thing is when you use 'loops' to have characters repeat sequences of moves. I think when kids grok these things these apps become just types of glofiried education flavoured video games. There are a lot of things in kodable for instance that I feel are just basic web games with coding terms slapped on it.

https://scratch.mit.edu/ is more like 'programming' imo, even at the level of the objective -- having a blank canvas to create something. It seems a little advanced for my kids right now though.