In late 90s I was in this programming course for kids for a couple of years. The software we used was called Baltazar; it was a C preprocessor and IDE (and some other tools like a sprite editor) that in its basic mode allowed you to control the a wizard on screen with simple commands. It's been decades but the basic syntax was something like this:
pplppprx(1,3)!
The "play area" of the screen was divided into a grid. Each p
meant "move one step forward in the direction you're facing", l
= turn 90 degrees left (r
would be the same for right), and x(1,3)
was "conjure the 3rd item on the 1st row (from a graphical list you could bring up in the editor)". So the wizard would start in the bottom left of the screen, move 2 steps forward, turn left (up), move 3 more steps, turn right again, and conjure a house or something. You could set properties to the conjured objects (passable/nonpassable etc.) and some of the premade exercises had mazes on the screen from the start, etc. The syntax had this cool visual representation of the program's flow - I don't remember it exactly, but it would look something like this:
program
_____________________________|___________________
part 1 part 2
pplpppr! some other commands!
(Wow, that was annoying to format. Thankfully the provided IDE did that automatically.)
There was also another version aimed at younger kids, possibly even preschoolers, that used icons instead of text. (Googling a bit it seems there was an international version called Baltie, too. At least I think it's the same thing, it's definitely the same company.) The version I used was aimed at early elementary schoolers, about grades 3-5. You could switch from the "baltazar" move-based language what I believe was basically C except localized into my language, too, and use cycles, conditions, functions, arrays, strings, manipulate files on disk...
There were even programming competitions and some of the games the kids made (it was always games of course) were really impressive; I recall there was even a rudimentary "open world" game where you could walk around a city (with traffic that killed you if it ran into you) and solve puzzles in various buildings, and it was made by a 12 year old kid.
Unfortunately I can't find any useful screenshots of the actual IDE.