[unknownknowns]

Agreed. When I started learning to program around 12, I was very motivated by what I wanted to make, not follow some bland tutorial ala CodeCademy.

From my experiences in university so far (Comp Sci), this experience seems to be pretty rare. If I ever have kids, I hope to be able to guide them in a similar way I learned as a kid. If they want to mod Minecraft, sure, let's start with that and not a boring tutorial for TodoApp#5034.

[wjh_]

What you say about Minecraft rings true. I've been trying to get my 12 year old brother into programming for a while, never really succeeded. Today I setup Forge and taught him how to make an item for Minecraft. That got him excited about programming (or at least what one can do with it) more than anything else.

[technomancy]

You should take a look at Minetest: http://minetest.net

It's a bit less polished, but far, far better when it comes to hacking. I found it significantly easier to create a mod for Minetest than to use a mod in Minecraft. Once my kids grasped the idea that they could add whatever items and behavior they could dream up, they really took a shine to it. The Lua coding used is very approachable.