@futurebird Don't know if it's something appropriate to your teaching, but last year I saw an excellent talk by Felienne Hermans, the creator of the Hedy programming language https://hedy.org/ . This guides young students through different levels of complexity onto full fledged Python.
You can watch her talk here, as she obviously explains it much better than me (it's video 15 in the playlist, you might enjoy the other talks as well!) https://pairprogramming.ed.ac.uk/winter-school-25/
I also recommend her article "A Case for Feminism in Programming Language Design" https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3689492.3689809