My kids learn Scratch at a large school. But are bored of it.
They asked the IT crew if they had heard of PICO-8. But no.

Some thoughts after a few weeks messing around (owner a TRS-80 in the mid 80s, an Amiga in the early 90s, and coded Wingz hyperscript on NeXT for a global bank - look that one up!).

It has huge potential for educational use (and doesn't need to be open source). Clearly the ideal is for it to be a console with its constrictions, but perhaps there could be a school-kid version. A few things might help take-up.

• Can just the font/text have better resolution (as per TRS-80, unrelated to the pixels) ?
• Some keyboard interaction (INPUT, INKEY$) would be huge for kids to get feedback into their code.
• A half-bright mode (for the 16 colours) would add a tremendous amount to the brilliant 3d and vector cartridges I’ve seen here).
• A sixth screen/panel for debug. On break it simply lists variables and values and tables (which seem to be the key to LUA but are not immediately intuitive).

[I plan to edit this Blog, is there a way to stop it coming up on the forum updates ?]

I think Pico 8 is cool, and also Lua has some nice features for beginners. I have been interested in using it for education as well, but it seems a little bit 'special interest'? I think it's an awesome opportunity to teach kids about how computers used to be, but for a next step up from scratch I would recommend Racket.

Racket is in the Lisp/Scheme family but was developed with middle schoolers in mind. It's IDE is quite nice and there are versions of the main language built in for beginners, providing a friendlier and gradual approach to learning. Helpful error messages and an awesome stepper for debugging. I'm currently using it for a Girls Who Code club and it's going well so far (3 sessions in).

There's definitely elements of Pico I would love to have specifically for making games, but I think I'd prefer to introduce it once the kids have a better understanding of data structures and functions. I'm not sure but it seems like the kids with scratch experience don't necessarily have that.

There's also still "Modernized" copies of the Logo language/LOGOWriter program out there. That's what I learned when I was a wee one. There's also GML and Darkbasic as well.

I think the pico-8 ascetic and text font is fine. Text editors can be used at anytime.

I teach coding for primary age children in the UK (i.e. 5-11yrs) and find that the best thing about Scratch is how it is geared towards making games, which the children find far more interesting than just pushing numbers around or something. I haven't used Pico-8 at this age range yet (definitely something I'm going to try though,) but as it is also geared towards making games and has the friendly all-in-one IDE, I think it should work well.