Like most here I always liked math and science. Nonetheless, growing up, I never felt like I was given a meaningful answer on "why do I need to learn math?" I t

Like most here I always liked math and science. Nonetheless, growing up, I never felt like I was given a meaningful answer on "why do I need to learn math?" I think we can do better with programming. The anecdote the OP gives, "learn coding so your really boring job [no offense to OP] will be less painful" is useful. Even better for high-school kids: "learn coding so you can Instagram all day at your job while your program works for you." I'm not condoning this, and obviously it's better to actually inspire true curiosity (extremely hard), but I think this kind of message would work for a lot of kids.