To add to the value of Scratch: it's taught at the start of Harvard's CS50 course for introductory programming. It's a drag-and-drop block-based code editor, which is good for learning about if statements and loops while getting an immediate result. (e.g. the instructions cause an animated character moves in a certain way). The immediate reward can help motivate programming, as it skips the time needed to memorize function names or syntax before understanding what you can do with programming.
I will chime in that I program professionally and first learned in the 7th grade in Scratch.
The most incredible moment for me was that for CS50 I found a game I had uploaded to scratch.mit.edu maybe 6 years earlier and submitted it (it was my own work, after all). Great platform, I remember fondly learning how to program a platformer on there without a camera system.
