Yeah, but as others observe this is a moving target. What impressed you and me in the 80s is not going to motivate a child that grew up playing on an iPad.
The art here is in finding the set of virtual objects needed for the desired result, ideally about which there is some existing intuition for reasoning about. In Mindstorms they have a good term for this that I've forgotten, of which the turtle is the object used to teach ideas of geometry, subroutines etc.
Thats true, but my son has enjoyed typing in "moving asterisk" games from an old VIC20 book into an emulator, and has enjoyed playing them too. He would still rather play on an iPad though. Oh well.
The art here is in finding the set of virtual objects needed for the desired result, ideally about which there is some existing intuition for reasoning about. In Mindstorms they have a good term for this that I've forgotten, of which the turtle is the object used to teach ideas of geometry, subroutines etc.