I think Codea should have more noob friendly interface. I am going for a interface similar to Stencyl’s interface http://www.stencyl.com/stencyl/overview/#section2 (A bit similar to Scratch). I think it should be toggleable so people can switch from noob to pro mode(The toggle being easily accessible). The interface could be somewhat similar to this image http://imgur.com/2NCKC. There should be built in libraries but also the ability to make custom blocks (could be used as a shortcut). The blocks should be color coded by category and the blocks could possibly be copied and pasted.
I actually believe at one point someone ported Scratch - it was rejected, but given the relaxation on interpreters, it may be viable today.
I would suggest Codea should NOT have an interface like this. TLL chose lua as the programming language for this app - not some graphic block thing. There are giant advantages, even to our “noob”, to this, namely a metric ton of information out there on the web about how to program in lua. Some sort of graphic shell over it would make most of those fine materials useless, and a person using Codea to learn would learn nothing but that graphic shell. There is a value to learning a language you can use elsewhere. There are also more practical matters - how do you cut and paste those graphics, so you can come to the forum and ask for help? I suspect having to toggle to/from “pro” mode is going to alienate the very n00bs you want to help.
Fact is - letters and words work really really well for communicating. Even with a computer. If you want Scratch - go use scratch. Heck - port it to the ipad, see if Apple will allow it, I’m 100% behind you! I’d mess with it (but I’m a programming language whore, I’ll use anything). But - Codea and lua are fine the way they are.
Followup - apparently there’s a flash version of scratch (or the scratch player, not 100% sure), and at least 2 apps (“rover”, an “educational” web browser, and “iswifter”) that will let you run arbitrary flash apps (!). So - you may be able to do scratch, or at least run the results, on the ipad. I also got some hints that apparently work is being done to effectively cross-compile flash apps to html5/javascript, and if that works presumably this will all work in the regular safari browser.