Nice idea, but the “rules” change between levels - I imagine that’d be super confusing to the learners. Given this is from a university and it has hopefully gone through some form of user research, the fact this works is quite surprising. (Imagine if you were learning English but what you learned last week no longer works)
My experience is that people of any level who say "can you teach me to code" will not learn by brute force. I try to start with the most basic of basics - but there's just WAY too many concepts there. No one even makes it to functions. Even most programmers take a long time to realize that the syntax they learned was as abstraction over the hardware... there's so so much to learn.
This idea of "gradual changes" is surely worth a test. Yeah, the rules might change - but at that level, the "rules" are just meaningless symbols anyway. If the ideas stick - and you truly understand them, not just memorize them - adapting will be a lot easier than recalling "oh yeah, for some reason there needs to be a semi-colon here".
I think it's really clever - I'm going to test-drive it on some unsuspecting nephews and neices.
