Some of my earliest motivation to learn programming was to build games. That proved too challenging to learn very quickly, but I had great fun drawing things on

Some of my earliest motivation to learn programming was to build games. That proved too challenging to learn very quickly, but I had great fun drawing things on the screen and making the PC speaker play music (simulating polyphonic sound by switching between notes very quickly). Seeing the results pop up on the screen was certainly a highly-motivating factor (and satisfaction with text results from algorithms came later ;-) )