First I'd like to mention that I like the toys ideas mentioned here as a tactile introduction. How did you learn to program? (Seriously, I'd like to know how

First I'd like to mention that I like the toys ideas mentioned here as a tactile introduction. How did you learn to program? (Seriously, I'd like to know how fellow News.YC members learned) I think for kids the most natural and fun way is to be self-taught, but have resources available to answer questions. I had an Atari 400 and eventually got bored with the games and wanted to program, so I put in the Atari Basic cartridge, looked at the graphics examples and started coding them in, then changing them, then writing my own stuff. I was completely self taught until I took a computer camp in the 7th grade and was exposed to mainframe computing and APL. That experience added to the base I had already established. The only downside to my experience is that I was exposed first to spaghetti code and did not learn to shun goto until after intro to computer science.