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To support your claim, people have been learning BASIC, Oberon, and [on kid side] Scratch very well for a long time. I'd love to see Smalltalk with its OOP testing against those. My guess is structured programming in BASIC or Scratch will come out ahead.

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Anecdotal: my 8-year old daughter loves Scratch, and I noticed that what she found the most intuitive was the message passing aspect of it. Assuming my kid is average in this respect, Smalltalk might have an edge in teaching kids how to code.

That makes sense. Kids will have passed messages person to person or place to place. Taking turns drawing on the same area is a bit less common. Doing math together exclusively by writing & erasing numbers on same, physical space would be extremely weird. Might be a better metaphor for shared-state concurrency. That's just what popped into my head thinking of the common examples people start out with like bank transfers.

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