Ohh I completely agree with you. But what I was mostly reacting to is the idea that the way to propel these kids into the 21st century is to simply teach them some basic coding syntax and leave it at that. Even the new AP CS curriculum seems to take a step back from "hard cs" by adding lots of content not directly related to solving cs problems. All that I really meant is that the true value in coding comes in using it to express solutions to problems, whereas teachers and schools that I've seen try to implement "coding" seem to think that if these kids just memorize syntax they have some great advantage in life.

I'll give you a perfect example. I was asked to evaluate this Scratch course for middle schoolers just as they were about to present their final projects. One of the kids did a basic pong-like game with human-controlled characters. The ball would move all over the place, seemingly randomly. The game didn't seem to make any sense to the kids who played it. But, the administration felt that this was an incredible success.

I later learned that he had produced the game by mostly following along a step-by-step tutorial introduced in class. And I also learned that the reason the ball moved erratically was that the kid had absolutely no concept of how to deal with the angles, much less identify what portion of the character the ball had struck!

To me, THAT would have been the real learning! What an opportunity to have taken that kid outside and kick a soccer ball (this was in Brazil) outside and explore some intuition about how it rebounded on the wall; what a chance to see if he could not come up with a way to grok a solution to figuring out to detect where in the character the ball had hit since this didn't come out-of-the-box in Scratch.

In other words, I don't mind that they learn the syntax. But there's a reason why firms outsource a lot of "coding" to South Asian countries for pennies on the dollar. Knowing the syntax is cheap. Stimulating kids to think about problems, developing a routine and passion about solving them, that's where the real pot of gold is.

The compiler/interpreter will correct your syntax. Explain it once and show where the documentation is, then let kids loose. There's no need to do a worksheet with 100 "spot the syntax error" problems or to have to write it out by hand on a piece of paper to learn it. That kind of pain is only going to teach kids that programming is a boring game of "find the missing semi-colon".

They're going to have to play that game anyway since the compiler/interpret won't spell out the exact issue every time. But they'll get through it anyway because their goal is something else rather than that game. A lot of learning comes from getting past stepping stones, but targeting a stepping stone as an explicit thing to learn and drill on is a poor plan.

Use languages with simple syntax and it's a non issue. There is no need for both a while and do loop in an intro coding course.

For control: foreach, while, Switch, Function

Datatypes: List, enum, Strings, signed 64 bit int, 64 floating point.

Would need a small standard library with IO.

Yes, I avoided the 'if' because Switch works and get's people thinking in less binary terms. Same with skipping arrays.