If you want to go old school... have you thought about Basic? :) No, seriously, hear me out.
Microsoft once created Small Basic [1][2], which is essentially the vintage Basic but targeting kids and education. It was updated to include a graphics interface, new modern language semantics, light OOP, and Logo-style commands. Not to be confused with Visual Basic.
When my son was 7, we went through the book "Learn to Program with Small Basic" [3] over several weeks, and he really enjoyed it. It taught him the basic concepts of variables, for-loops, control flow, etc. The language was intuitive for him to follow, and the Small Basic IDE and syntax are user-friendly and non-intrusive (especially when compared to VSCode, or services like Repl.it).
A couple of caveats to keep in mind:
1) Microsoft hasn't updated SB since 2015, so it's (was) showing its age. It appears it has been open sourced in 2019, and there are now community efforts to modernize it. This sounds great, but I haven't looked at it.
2) SB runs only on Mac and Windows. To make matters worse, the version for Mac is (was) terrible, so I ended up loading a Windows VM on a Mac host, and running SB inside it.
After that he did some more dabbling with PICO-8 and Lua (we built a Pong game together), then played with Minecraft, and eventually he moved on to other interests (music, etc).
More recently his curiosity sparked again, and now he just started learning Python using P5.js (basically Processing for Python, which offers a very visual experience out of the box).
We just started 1:1 tutoring classes using a service called Strive Math [4], and he's loving it. I found Strive Math exactly because I wanted someone who used P5 and offered a more visual learning experience, and that's exactly what these folks do. Still early, but early results are very promising.
Microsoft once created Small Basic [1][2], which is essentially the vintage Basic but targeting kids and education. It was updated to include a graphics interface, new modern language semantics, light OOP, and Logo-style commands. Not to be confused with Visual Basic.
When my son was 7, we went through the book "Learn to Program with Small Basic" [3] over several weeks, and he really enjoyed it. It taught him the basic concepts of variables, for-loops, control flow, etc. The language was intuitive for him to follow, and the Small Basic IDE and syntax are user-friendly and non-intrusive (especially when compared to VSCode, or services like Repl.it).
A couple of caveats to keep in mind:
1) Microsoft hasn't updated SB since 2015, so it's (was) showing its age. It appears it has been open sourced in 2019, and there are now community efforts to modernize it. This sounds great, but I haven't looked at it.
2) SB runs only on Mac and Windows. To make matters worse, the version for Mac is (was) terrible, so I ended up loading a Windows VM on a Mac host, and running SB inside it.
After that he did some more dabbling with PICO-8 and Lua (we built a Pong game together), then played with Minecraft, and eventually he moved on to other interests (music, etc).
More recently his curiosity sparked again, and now he just started learning Python using P5.js (basically Processing for Python, which offers a very visual experience out of the box).
We just started 1:1 tutoring classes using a service called Strive Math [4], and he's loving it. I found Strive Math exactly because I wanted someone who used P5 and offered a more visual learning experience, and that's exactly what these folks do. Still early, but early results are very promising.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Small_Basic
[2] https://smallbasic-publicwebsite.azurewebsites.net/
[3] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1593277024/
[4] https://www.strivemath.com/