Jeroo

Jeroo is a very good intermediary language between a drag-and-drop menu one like Scratch, and something purely language based, like Python. It provides a set of pre-determined capabilities, within the context of moving around the Jeroo and having it manipulate the world. Due to its limited set of functions, and the clear context for the commands, it still maintains the ease of access of Scratch. However, it also helps to introduce how programming languages, specifically Python, handle code. It helps you figure out how code should be laid by giving you a small set of commands, and allowing you to figure out how best to string together lines of code, and the general syntax of python. So, it helps to ease you into the language, while still maintained a limited level of control that prevents the programmer from getting overwhelmed by all the available commands, and gives context to those commands so that they're more understandable.