I’ve always found it weird that Arduino has its own language. On top of it, it’s not a really well designed one in the sense that it does not follow a simple paradigm where there are few basic fundamentals and from there it’s only vocabulary.
One thing that’s pretty cool about your case of having two kids of different ages is that you can make them play a sort of an asymmetric ping-pong game where one becomes the game master/designer to the other.
I have a son that’s about to turn 6 now. Since the age of two I’ve been playing with him with Cubetto https://primotoys.com/. Cubetto is a no-screen programming of a robot using physical directional shapes.
When I help them with a playful narrative (I’ve even written an article about it), he and his friends enjoyed it a lot. They play with moving it around.
However, my observation is that at this age they are not ready for the more advanced feature of reexecutable code (the Cubetto board has this equivalent of a callable procedure). They struggle even with the simpler random or invert commands (which are an extension pack actually).
One nice thing is that there is a learning path towards disassembling the robot and potentially (unofficially) towards reprogramming its Arduino. So kids can also tinker with at later age.
As you can see, I’m quite enthusiastic about the technology and could share some further resources, if anyone cares to read them.
Wow, great! Didn’t know Alice is still a thing. I’ve remember trying it out when I was a kid when it was little more than a syntax highlighting IDE (or at least that’s how I remember it). I see with Alice 2 and Alice 3 it has leapfrogged. Still, scratch/squeak feel more accessible to small kids to me.
If this is about age (and it might not be), the age range in question is very sensitive. A typical kid at 6 can’t yet read or do simple maths. On the website I found these indicative ages
Regarding your last point, I totally share that disposition, but I’d think math/functional is a different type of skill/competence and its basics have way too little to do with computers. Probably the most relevant here is that pure dynamically typed languages like smalltalk, logo, python and JavaScript (the ones that you’ll probably end up teaching anyway) are so versatile that they successfully implement both the functional and object-oriented paradigms, so you can choose how to look at them.