> [picture of Tips Kitty] Don't forget! Every time you see " ⦙ " in the listing, press the [Tab] key on your keyboard. See page 23 to learn why this is important.
I don't think you actually used those books :-/
No one linearly writes code, from the start of the file to the end; they edit it. They move blocks around if they missed a page, they navigate around putting in missing if statements and removing incorrectly-added loops. Those programs were very much not one-and-done, they were heavily modified by the kids.
Your proposal of "Tell them to configure their editor for Python" and "add in unicode symbols to represent whitespace" is the exact opposite of what those books were about.
The books were about removing superfluous barriers, not adding them! Using Python would result in a whole lot of incidental complexity for literally no gain.
I never used the Usborne books because I was a US kid but I sure typed in a lot of stuff from books and magazines for my c64, often while modifying it on the fly. And dealing with accidentally skipped pages. And went on to learn assembly language.