I'll give a shout out to Apple here. Swift Playgrounds is engaging (even adults love it). XCode is a forgiving IDE for a 12 year old. And the materials are well

I'll give a shout out to Apple here. Swift Playgrounds is engaging (even adults love it). XCode is a forgiving IDE for a 12 year old. And the materials are well grounded in CS. The advantage here is that programs run immediately on Apple hardware, which kids like and makes them feel like a pro. https://www.apple.com/education/k12/teaching-code/ https://www.apple.com/education/k12/teaching-code/ I grew up with Logo and Turtle Graphics and I loved it. Still obsessed with computer graphics to this day. I think the great thing about those old environments is that it wasn't really about "coding" as a path to a software engineering job. It was more about "applied geometry" and the wonderful patterns of nature emerging via simple iterative functions repeated endlessly ;)