Loops would probably be easier to teach if they taught "goto" first. "Goto" is easy for beginners to grasp, and loops can be taught in terms of it.
"Ok. First I need to make my variables. Ok. There they ok. Good. Now I need to figure out what I want to do with them. Ok. That's that. Now I need to repeat this 5 times, so I need a repeater loop..."
That's kind of how it looked. Writing a program to tabulate diving scores was fun!