Programming today is such an abstract craft that appears very complex to non-programmers and that is against anything a person needs to have in order to learn n

Programming today is such an abstract craft that appears very complex to non-programmers and that is against anything a person needs to have in order to learn new stuff. It's like trying to teach a kid to ride a bike by showing him pictures symbolizing the physics of balance and pedalling and steering. No, you need something very concrete and hands-on. That's why kids learn to ride a bike on the bike and not in a simulator. With regard to programming, we've gone backwards a lot. What I would do is put up an 80's personal computer with built-in BASIC into an emulator. (Or find a similar environment for modern computers: I don't know any but would be interested to hear about it.) Nothing beats the joy of enlightenment when you POKE your first ball-shaped character on the screen, or write a FOR loop to move it around a bit, or POKE some values into foreground and background colors. And you realize that all the machine has is a list of numbered slots (memory addresses) that (almost) all can have values read from and written to them, and those values change the way the computer works. Note that you can still write a byte to the framebuffer on modern computers to light a pixel, but it's much more easier to try things out on a 40x25 grid rather than on a 1600x1200x24bit array of RGB values. A computer is really a very simple machine and if you don't tell your kid that most normal people think programming is scary, he won't know that. I've read of stories where woman office workers were in fact programming in the 60's and 70's, they just didn't realize that.