0 Primitives for a Robotic Arm

This morning, I listened to a presentation by Glenn Nickens from Norfolk State University. He was actually one of my competitors in the Student Research Competition (SRC). The motivation of his research is to develop a high level primitives for a robotic arm, to reduce the learning curve for undergraduate students. Essentially, Glenn wants to design an API for a robotic arm such that the user doesn't have to worry about low level implementation details.

I thought this was particularly interesting, and I immediately thought of scaffolding in CS. Using such an API to teach the basics and then slowly removing 'layers' - ie. students will eventually program the low level details. What other ways can we use scaffolding to teach complex topics in CS?