This may be worth considering, as far as not forcing it upon them. I learned to code as a kid not from my parents teaching me, but from my dad buying a Vic20 a

This may be worth considering, as far as not forcing it upon them. I learned to code as a kid not from my parents teaching me, but from my dad buying a Vic20 and then a Commodore 64 (I ended up learning on the 64, but a few years later when the 64 was still the 'family' computer I got to use the vic20 in my room as a personal machine. It mostly played Paratrooper and Seawolf though) and very non-chalantly encouraging me to use it. I fuzzily recall that as I started to explore the Commodore BASIC, he would buy himself programming books and magazines that he just never seemed to have time to use. I suspect this may have been his clever way of giving me a leg up without pushing. In later years, when we upgraded to an IBM machine he got me some programming books and tools from a friend (REXX, which was interesting and close enough to BASIC to make it an easy transition) to give me more to play with. Thinking on it, I suspect that the 'piano lessons' analogy might be right. Find a way to encourage your kids to catch the bug as far as hacking and poking at the system, and then find subtle ways to encourage them. It almost makes me think there'd be some real value in a kids game that did this. Kind of a situation where the kid who is clever enough can figure out how to 'break' the game and poke at how it works, and push it along. I say this mostly because when I learned, I started playing with BASIC because the software was loaded through it. I recall one day wondering what the hell "LOAD "*", 8,1" meant and why it made the game run. And it went on from there... My father never had any programming knowledge, in fact he was a Nurse. But his non-interfering encouragement pushed me along onto a nice little path that seems to have worked out pretty well so far.