A team of my high school students made a video game about the Lewis & Clark expedition. One part of the interface required arrows to hit a bulls-eye, distance from the center depending on how accurately the player answered numerical questions. The students wanted the arrows to be spread randomly about the circular area. One student worked out a scheme using the Pythagorean Theorem which took roughly 100 lines of code in the Transcript language. Another student did some research about trigonometry and came up with a more elegant solution that took about half the code. From what I've experienced so far in Wolfram Language, positioning the arrows would have taken five lines of code or less. That leaves more time for the students to solve problems and less time writing and debugging code.

Another game had the players banking a virtual laser off a mirror and through a refractive medium. One ambitious student built a circular chess game. Another distorted the colors of paintings so players could get used to identifying different color schemes. A team of students was stymied when they tried to make a game on taxonomy because the data set would have to be too massive. Yet another project that was loosely modeled on Magic the Gathering, a game in the same general genre as Dungeons & Dragons, had cards that featured artists, musicians, scientists, historical figures, etc. along with associated artifacts. Though the students finished that game successfully, it was limited by the size of the underlying database, the structure of the data, and how the data was accessed and processed.

These are just a few examples from over a hundred that the students, with a bit of guidance, produced. I think that every one of them would have been better if the students were using Wolfram Language. Why? Because classroom time is limited, so a succinct language like WL allows the students to get more done in less time. Their time with the language would have been spent learning about what functions do, what happens when you nest them, etc. instead of trying to hunt down the scope of a variable or figure out some arcane syntax. Many of the games, like the taxonomy game or the game involving refractive media, would have benefited from access to curated data. I think that the students would learn more about programming, about math, about the academic subjects that the games are based on.

If I were to use WL in the classroom, that is how I envision it. Having done it with cruder resources, I know that the approach works.

(Sorry for the longwindedness. I'm an English teacher too.)

I'm a foot soldier in education, a veteran public high school teacher, mostly for inner-city kids. On paper I have been teaching English and Math, but whenever I can I teach programming. My students always had a goal and programming was part of reaching that goal. Often the goal is to make educational video games because it catches most students' interest and, hey, that's the way I roll. I find that some curricula that set out to "teach programming" treat programming as the end, rather than a way to realize a concept. The end shouldn't be some arbitrary assigned product, like a digital rolodex or an inventory reporting app; it should be something that the students really see value in.

The trend today is to start beginners with shallow but easily learned "languages" like Scratch, Game Maker, or Lego Mindstorm. My observation is that students need deeper languages than these, real full-fledged languages that can take the students where their imaginations go.

To answer the question, I would favor starting with young students, perhaps in middle school, on projects that have meaning to them. Once the students start to feel the power that programming brings, they will thirst for more. A deep, rich programming language like Wolfram can take them as far as they wish to go. This would drive the need for more advanced classes.