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I remember being introduced to HyperCard in the late 80’s/early 90’s. Does a modern day equivalent exist?
Caveat: I’m a marketer, not a coder (said in my best “Bones” McCoy voice). But I thought this would be a fun father-son thing to learn together and help expand his coding skills.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiveCode?wprov=sfti1
That said, I think Scratch is a better learning environment these days and you can develop workable apps in the style of HyperCard. There are plenty of tutorials, documentation, and examples to work from.
2. Bubble is easy for non-coders. https://bubble.io/
3. Gambas BASIC is a bit more technical, but will give you hard 90's vibes (Linux only) https://gambas.sourceforge.net/en/main.html
I think the advent of LLMs might make these types of tools more accessible to non-coders, or at least I hope so.
Decker https://beyondloom.com/decker/
Theoretically, it's possible to add network fetching to Decker, but it's an exercise left to the reader.
Leaving out networking feels very intentional in Decker, and if you start to go down that rabbit hole, I imagine it quickly devolves into all the pain and complexity of modern webdev.
(Would be happy if I'm wrong and happy to find out it's all there in Decker now.)
Decker https://beyondloom.com/decker/
Probably the correct answer. (I loved HyperCard as a kid and built a ton of stuff with it.) My only complaint about Decker as-is (last time I played with it) is that it has no ability out-of-the-box to make any kind of network connection to do anything. e.g. grabbing some data, triggering some webhook, etc. is all a no-go. Decker is completely self-contained and oblivious about the internet (a lot like HyperCard was)…
It's very unlikely the school is digging deep in Scratch. Most likely they are keeping to the very basics - and a kid can go deeper on their own... or not.
As the next step, moving to python or whichever other language is okay. And I doubt very much that at 11 they are already exhausting Scratch. A web browser and javascript is fine too.