I think the most important part at all ages is to connect it to something they actually want to do, and remove as many of the "artificial" barriers to that as p

I think the most important part at all ages is to connect it to something they actually want to do, and remove as many of the "artificial" barriers to that as possible like tooling configuration, anything beyond rudimentary command line operations, C-style memory allocation and type finessing. It's easier to come back on that stuff once they have some confidence & context for it. With kids you kind of have to tease out their motivations. A lot of them default to "make a game" because it's something they know and it's tangible, but once they start to see the potential they reorient. For example I've had multiple "game dev" classes devolve into "pull live sports scores and text it to me" once they realize how possible that is. I've had discord bots brought up before by multiple kids, so that is a good one too. Generative art is another, or like I've seen really academically-focused kids get excited about just using jupyter to make graphs. The younger they are the bigger the swings between excitement and frustration, and the more your value shifts from technical prowess to emotional nurturer. When I taught adults it was the "fundamentals of programming" module of a web dev bootcamp, the first thing they encountered there. For the most part these were disciplined motivated professionals and the thing they actually wanted to do was learn web development. So it was pretty easy to connect to their goals by just saying like "trust me you need this." I haven't done a specific goal-oriented focused class like that for adults. But I think the main thing is still just keep it pointed towards the target and don't get bogged down in configuration or tooling. The great thing about an environment like roblox or I assume excel is that you have the total runtime & dev env right there without having to deal with external tools.