I think one of the problems in introducing CS education in K-12 is the lack of a clear widespread rationale for it.

This question is not unique for this list, but it still matters here. There are different goals we may be pursuing,

such as:

- To introduce "fun activities" so that students get less bored in school

- To replace "old-fashioned" core subjects that are less relevant than computing nowadays

- To teach students "real-world skills" so that they can get better jobs

- To help students learn other subjects because "code makes these subjects easier to understand"

- To do something now, because "we think it will become useful in their future", even if we don't know exactly how

- To help children "understand our technological world" better

I am partially paraphrasing Simon Peyton Jones'  excellent talk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-xgWLYQc4g

Then, another problem is that to make way for it, something else needs to go, and it is not clear what could be

taken away, especially in high school. Should we have one more core subject and less art and PE?

Finally, depending on what the goal is, we have the question of how to accomplish that goal. In particular, what

exactly should be taught to the children, what the expectations are and how we will assess whether they

learned enough.

My personal interest lies in the intersection of coding and math, and the potential of code to illustrate math concepts

and help develop a mathematical intuition. At the same time, I see mathematics as a very fertile ground for all kinds

of computational problems, with an endless supply of interesting questions at all levels of difficulty. In this context,

a pure functional language is the optimal choice, because it helps the students stay focused on the objectives without

getting distracted (or, rather, seduced, as SPJ mentions) by the infinite possibilities of tweaking the look and feel forever.

While my take is probably shared (at least partially) by most people in this list, it is a minority view in the current CS education community.

The challenge is how to make a case for our goal within the current environment, where the goal seems to be just "learning Python"

for the sake of learning Python (or JavaScript) with no further thoughts beyond that.

Fernando