Though this idea is awesome. It sounds lazy too. Why would you want this site to cater your needs as a teacher? If you're that busy to complain about such simple things for your own good, why make yourself busy creating something for you to work out things with? No offense here. just sayin.

I'm in the same boat as you are, because I want to start using codewars to gameify my intro to software design course (a community college course). I think educational traffic would be good for codewars, since it would expand the user base (as well as lending a certain prestige). If you view codewars as "for hackers, by hackers," then the model doesn't fit. But, if you view it as a resource for a growing community of programmers, it does.

Thats awesome. There is no official way to make a chain but you can usually get close by using keywords in the name. You could prefix each kata with a name, to help tag it as a set. So Junior: or something (thats not a great prefix name but its all I got right now). Maybe you can use the name of your school/clan as the prefix. That will help them group together within the related kata. Also if you are the one authoring them, they should already be grouped by the "other kata from this author" section - though that section shows less items.

In terms of progression, thats not as easy on CW. You can just try numbering your kata - but since different kata can get approved faster than others it can result in them being approved out of order. Another way of doing a progression is to have it within a single kata, with the test cases gradually getting harder and harder. That doesn't always work though for some formats/challenges. This challenge is pretty advanced but its a good example of how it gradually forces the developer to refactor and expand their code in increasing difficult ways.

Yeah 8 Kyu was originally intended for true begininers but as the site has grown and become crowdsourced they have started to get a bit more tricky. However anything at the Codeacademy level is probably better off there, with more hand holding. While not all of the 8 kyu on Codewars would be great for that context, I imagine there should be a good number of them that are. You do need a little challenge to give you something to rise to the occasion for.

While your suggestion is positive and welcome, a little grasshopper can be 8kyu, I see nothing wrong with that.

It might be that you have come across a complicated 8kyu kata by accident.
As a mentor, your task would be then, to find the easy 8kyu katas, or, really, create a chain of your own.