My first college computer class, in the fall of 1982, used Karel the Robot as the introduction to programming in Pascal. I found it an entertaining and useful introduction to structured programming. While structured programming has fallen out of favor in deference to object oriented programming, I still think this can be a useful introduction to computer programming. And I think that children are entertained by the idea of instructing a robot to perform a task, and then watching the robot actually follow the instructions.
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