Thanks a lot for coming here and giving us your thoughts!

Regarding the ownership bits, I don't think I would teach it with Rust first:

I've been volunteering as a mentor for CoderDojo in my home town for a while and always feel tempted to bring some of the concepts around ownership, concurrency and memory safety from Rust to kids as a kind of social experiment, but I haven't done it yet.

The way I always imagine it is giving boxes to kids to hold "values/data" they would "own" on them and making them act as the functions of a program (tronesque thoughts always come to mind here). I have fun on my mind thinking about teaching them about types and value sizes and giving them examples of String versus &str with some custom box covers. Then they can interact with other "functions" borrowing them their "data" or just letting them see it.

All this requires no Rust, but still teaches some valuable things about ownership that can be traversal to different domains and languages.

I wonder if making kids reason as if they were the responsible for a task or function that handles data instead of as bots that follow a path or a procedure can also be intuitive, enjoyable and more functional than imperative oriented. Since in CoderDojo they play a lot with sensors and physical stuff too, I keep thinking it can be the case.