I had heaps of trouble with this. Kids have an obscene amount of choice nowadays, and it's crippling. Back in the day, we had no choice: you learned BASIC, and

I had heaps of trouble with this. Kids have an obscene amount of choice nowadays, and it's crippling. Back in the day, we had no choice: you learned BASIC, and when you realised it was too slow, you learned assembler. I was shown my first ever BASIC program on a Commodore PET by a sixth-form student when I was about 13 or 14. There was no-one to teach you, so you were pretty much on your own. I swear that experience of learning Z80 assembler by typing in the hex or decimal opcodes (I couldn't afford an assembler), was the single most important event of my programming career. With my kids I was pretty hands-off. Pushing them too hard would probably result in rebellion. But when my son started asking what language he should start with, I found it very hard. We tried Minecraft modding, in Java. Then some Python, which he took to fairly quickly (age 12 or 13). Now he's well into C#, which is a language I'm not even fluent in, because they study it in CS at school. He launched into it full throttle in his spare time and now he's developing a game. He occasionally asks me to help with debugging a tricky problem, which is where I think I'm most useful now. My daughter is now 12 and she's also interested. She pretty much exhausted Scratch in primary school. I'm trying to introduce her to Python and then Arduino - she wants to build some colour-changing lights for her bedroom, so it's an ideal Arduino project. I'm trying not to go down the whole pink, let's-make-it-fun, girls-can-code-too stereotype, but since she genuinely wants to build this project I can't really refuse. The key thing is wait until they feel the need - don't push it onto them too young. There's a whole world of non-programming stuff they need to learn first!