when I was learning programming as a kid it was all about video games. Quake was a new game and it had an embedded language called QuakeC that controlled the ga

when I was learning programming as a kid it was all about video games. Quake was a new game and it had an embedded language called QuakeC that controlled the game logic. That was hugely fun for making Quake mods. That set me up to do programming in Perl and C. I would probably play to their interests with projects that are more concrete than abstract. If they are into video games, lots of games have mod languages and they can start by giving themselves more health, more power, different weapons etc. If they are into social media maybe javascriptlets to edit the DOM on a website to change peoples tweets and take a screenshot, twitter or insta bot that automatically responds to certain types of posts, etc. Teenagers should be able to grasp non-toy languages and the concept of searching StackOverflow for how to do stuff :)