When I was 11 or so we had a class where the teacher spent probably a total of 10 days of the year doing instruction, and the rest of it he just cut us loose on

When I was 11 or so we had a class where the teacher spent probably a total of 10 days of the year doing instruction, and the rest of it he just cut us loose on a bunch of late 80s-era Macs, with a few games, a word processor, and Hypercard installed. We were allowed to play games a bit if we were bored, but otherwise we either had to write something, or make stacks. I mostly made stacks, and while I stuck to the visual tools in Hypercard at first, once I realized how much more I could do actually writing the code myself I got pretty into it. I didn't actually realize I had been doing computer programming until years later. That might be the most influential class I ever took, looking back 25 years later, and it was so mostly because the teacher got the hell out of the way and let us be kids. Also, I miss Hypercard :-)