My observation is that basic syntax errors (indentation, missing colons, etc) take up a ton of time for students and that this takes away from the real learning goals. I agree that there have been a ton of attempts to solve this problem so the onus is on me to demonstrate that there are better outcomes starting with Pickcode vs Python.

Pickcode roughly falls under the category of "frame based editor" and there has been some research that suggests it's a potentially useful approach.

Time will tell if it works! I think there's still quite a bit of work on the app before I can start conducting that research in a formal way.