Basically all those graphical applications for developing apps and programs.
Take fucking Thunkable for example.
Or the unholy abomination that is scratch.

Contradictory to the education system, I believe that it absolutely does not prepare students for programming.

Like "ummm puzzle goes there uuhh that goes there ajdjsudheirnrifksmci"

I agree that it doesn't prepare anyone for programming, not really, but with kids it can get them interested un building logic and making things do what they want them to do.

As a kid I started with ActionScript 1.0 in flash essentially and I just wanted to make clickable buttons essentially. But I was always a bit of a nerd, the visual representation might actually have a good Impact on some more visual learners...

Though I agree that stuff like Scratch are dumb.

I think there are better options:
1. Godot 3 has It's own node based visual Logic builder

2. Theres a Minecraft modding tool that allows you to make MC mods using visual logic blocks, much like scratch but with actual output value

3. There are mods for Minecraft with programmable computers and miners with Ruby

I think depending on the child, one or multiple of these could spark interest much easier. Projects like Scratch are too disconnected from reality to be interesting for kids imo

@Hazarth I do know of points 1 and 3. In fact for the while we had a minecraft server running on the discord, we've had opencomputers with lua.

I believe that stuff might be useful as it does not fully obscure code behind nodes.

Although, given Unreal Engine's Node based programming, that stuff might be pretty good.

@Ranchonyx

I think we're approaching education from the wrong side tbh.

Projects like Thunkable and Scratch seem to have been designed as education tools from ground up and mostly missed...

Instead of creating education tools that we want kids and young adults to use, we should observe what they already do use, and give it an educational aspect.

I think this approach is similar to the idea of building paths where people walk rather where you want them to walk.

There will probably never be a one-for-all tool that will be able to teach any kind of software development to everyone. But if we start adapting popular projects and games into education tools we might hit the spot for more different people in more different ways.

@Hazarth I fully agree on that matter.
I mean, if it worked in Sweden, why not the rest of the world as well?

Mmmmmm wix sites