annag42

I'm familiar with Scratch as an element of the first category; what other (meta-)programs do you recommend?

I learned some HyperCard and some Basic as a kid, but didn't get hooked until i could do useful things with shell scripting in college, which is definitely a case for category 2, or perhaps something even simpler: programs written in a plain text editor or even just on the command line itself.

The power to do things that matter is typically more motivating to girls than to boys, who will do something just because it's there (ie, why boys tend to play more video games and more girls end up in teaching and social-justice work). Just trying to provide another perspective. :)

How insightful. I hope we can learn to integrate computer literacy topics gracefully in with other forms of communication (such as math/puzzle solving, writing/composition, the arts, and the sciences) in a way that motivates and interacts synergistically with those other topics, rather than squeezing them out as outmoded forms of only-historical relevance.

One advantage of the "how to train your robot" activity is that abstraction can occur more than in RoboRally, such as creating repeatable subroutines (eg, turn around then say "I'm dizzy" 100 times).

You should see whether you can get a copy of RoboRally in Dutch, or at least in German if that would work. If not, consider translating the cards, each of which has an arrow and a direction, such as "turn left", "back up", or "move forward 3".