It's just like teaching anything: nothing is really fun until you can do something. I teach guitar, so let me use that as an example: it's my job as a teacher

It's just like teaching anything: nothing is really fun until you can do something. I teach guitar, so let me use that as an example: it's my job as a teacher to get students to love the guitar so they (1) continue with it, and (2) come to the next lesson. the only way I can make sure students get excited is if they can do some thing. So I could bog them down with a bunch of theory and stuff, or explain the mechanics of hand movements in very technical detail. But those things really don't matter. What does matter is reducing the essence of a few things into a simple exercise that the student can do and that sounds good. If you took a guitar lesson from me, you'd probably leave the first lesson able to strum a few chords in time. Of course, you just learned a ton of stuff: how to use your fingers on the fretboard, how to keep the beat, how to strum, posture, hand positions -- the list goes on. All you care about, as the student, is that you can do something. You feel successful. You have something to practice. As you progress, you become more interested in the finer details (or you quit) and we go deeper -- explaining music theory, patterns, technique and mechanics, etc. Zed teaches programming the same way. Give the student something to do where they can see immediate results. The ones that stick with it are going to be naturally curious about how things work and will keep going further. I used "Learn Python the Hard Way" as my introduction to programming. It was awesome.