Arduino alternative for learning?

Question

Arduino

Are there equally convenient solutions on other microcontrollers specifically for education? Audience - children from 10 to 16 years.
What I like about Arduino and want to have on another platform:
- the presence of an environment for graphical programming (Ardublocks)
- the necessary and sufficient minimum of parts on the board, everything else (buttons, LEDs, sensors, etc. peripherals) is connected by wires.
- C-shaped YAP for those who are older.
- many examples
What I don't like:
- a rather buggy compiler in the Arduino IDE, the programs turn out to be large, sometimes glitches like ignoring nested loops, etc.
- Low speed of working with peripherals, of course, is solved by certain libraries, but it would be better right out of the box.
- For some tasks, in principle, you want more speed, as well as memory.

Answer 1

The alternative is to use the Arduino hardware, but do not use the IDE and libraries, but bare C or C ++. This will allow students to create a problematic situation (look, shitty code on the IDE slows down, and normally written code is tricky), which stimulates them to grow professionally.

Answer 2

The only alternative for kids is Lego NXT.
Expensive, of course, but worth it
. You also need to understand that Arduino is not a children's toy (although the same will do), but a prototyping tool. In principle, no one bothers you to program boards directly via SPI and write programs in AVR Studio in C or Assembler