Having done some serious introspection with regards to how I ended up as a developer, I think that playing strategy-oriented video games (loosely defined, for i

Having done some serious introspection with regards to how I ended up as a developer, I think that playing strategy-oriented video games (loosely defined, for instance I'd put Pokemon Yellow in this category), and card games like MtG definitely prepared me for it. You learn to make tradeoffs (you can only have 6 Pokemon in your lineup, you want no more than 60 cards in a Magic deck, etc), and you learn to creatively compose primitives into solutions to problems, within a defined set of rules. Specifically, I think that a lot of efforts to get kids into computers these days are too literal about it. The value of learning to think like a programmer is not exclusively in one's ability to write programs (though that's certainly a powerful and valuable skill), it's in one's ability to solve problems within constraints. I'd argue that computer literacy is an orthogonal skill. Given that, things that stimulate the brain in ways similar to programming (e.g. deep strategy games) will probably have orders of magnitude more success than the more literal approach of "teaching kids to program".