100% agree. Trying to teach them to break things up into modules won't make sense to them, unless they write a 1000 line program, and then go to change it and

100% agree. Trying to teach them to break things up into modules won't make sense to them, unless they write a 1000 line program, and then go to change it and things break. They have plenty of time to learn good software engineering practices, decades in fact. They don't need to be a genius at first strike, they just need to learn how to code. Trying to teach them perfection at the beginning is a huge mistake.