I would say anything from Zachtronics - these games are like core programming concepts as games and are fundamentally different from mainstream AAA shooters. I

I would say anything from Zachtronics - these games are like core programming concepts as games and are fundamentally different from mainstream AAA shooters. I especially recommend SpaceChem and ExaPunks. Dwarf Fortress, if your children can manage to play it, has a steep learning curve but is a weird and wonderful simulation of a fantasy environment with immense depth. My college roommate played an immense amount of Dwarf Fortress and had minor fame among other DF players for the magnitude of his projects. For the years that he played that game he would play it non-stop - literally non-stop there was always a computer in our apartment running Dwarf Fortress 24/7 as dwarves worked on his instructions creating enormous monuments and castles. He always had crazy stories about what his dwarfs had done and how his fortress was developing. Minecraft and Factorio are pretty popular but also pretty different from the shoot-em ups. At least, Minecraft can be, there are mods and variants of Minecraft that are basically fighting/FPS games. Factorio touches on a key concept in programming. I think of it as gamifying the idea of scaling your code. You get a system working, you build a bigger system, you find a bottleneck, you remove it. You keep repeating this cycle, looking at your metrics, until you realize your factory is a mess of spaghetti that you can hardly keep running - so you refactor...