Good Advice! To expand on the above, i think more generally kids should be taught Abstraction and how to map Concepts to Symbols which they can then manipulate

Good Advice! To expand on the above, i think more generally kids should be taught Abstraction and how to map Concepts to Symbols which they can then manipulate based on defined rules. IIRC, Douglas Hofstadter's book GEB invents various "games" using symbols/rules to introduce Formal Systems.