Addendum: I'm currently volunteering with a project teaching middle school children to program, and I am impressed by how much they're able to accomplish after

Addendum: I'm currently volunteering with a project teaching middle school children to program, and I am impressed by how much they're able to accomplish after a single lesson. I'm not sure they're independently designing programs or solving problems, but they're definitely independently exploring the space adjacent to the example programs by experimenting, and they're making sense of the results and learning. It helps that this is a graphical/block environment where they're able to discover syntax and keywords on their own, and ingest the program output as cool patterns/behaviors.