The biggest stepping stone to encouraging more interest in Pascal at any level is industry.

Whilst industry sees Pascal as outdated, it will continue to insist that educational institutions teach C++, Java, C# etc.

Unfortunately, industry is in love with the 'next big thing' because its new, innovative... it must be better... right And of course, we musn't forget the millions of lines of code that already exist... industry will want maintainers for this, so again, they will want C++ and Java.

From my personal experiences, I've come to the conclusion that much of this is down to middle to upper managers, who understand only the latest buzz words. In other words, they don't actually have a clue about what may or may not actually be the best language. One project I worked on, the company had around 15 Delphi developers. We worked our butts off to build this system. It won them some big contracts and was in its own right a fantastic system... at that point, middle management stepped in and decided that the whole thing needed to be re-written in C++ (at the time, C++ was one of the buzz words)... as a consequence, nearly the whole of the development team were forced out or gotten rid of. That is the kind of stupid business decision that drives languages forward, and whilst that sort of thing is happening, an older language, like Pascal, stands little chance of making head way in industry.

Of course as has been pointed out, there are schools that are teaching with older versions of Pascal... now my personal take on this is that the world of windows programming can be more than a little daunting, even for an experienced developer. So I think teaching them the basics using older versions which don't have that overhead isn't such a bad thing. It wouldn't be very good to scare them off. There is also the point that only a small percentage of software engineers are games developers and so it is better to teach the kids stuff that is likely to be useful in a wide range of fields.

I don't actually think the problem is the choice of teaching tool, I think the problem is the kids themselves. They are bombarded with high tech and fancy graphics everywhere and so can't appreciate the simple wonder of writing simple programs, couple this with most kids apparent inability to sit still and concentrate for any longer than about 30 seconds and whatever is used isn't going to garner interest in it.

Personally, I think the key to encouraging Pascal adoption is to snag the people (especially kids) who like to think for themselves... hook them and prove to them that Pascal is a modern language that can compete with C++, Java, C# etc. and it may just start making some headway in industry... when it does that, it will start making headway elsewhere because industrys demand for Pascal programmers will rise.

Just my thoughts :-)