[SmallDeadGuy]

The curiosity is still there in kids though, and that's what matters when it comes to learning game development. Around the age of 11 or 12 I got curious, and discovered Game Maker which at the time was a very simple little tool with a simple graphics editor and some action/event blocks you could drag in order to make things move. Making some basic puzzle games with this was easy, but anything more complicated required diving into the built-in scripting language GML (Game Make Language) that I've long since forgotten.

After that I also played with flash games, disassembling them using some strange tool into a kind-of assembly-like code where I tweaked values and instructions to see what happened.

Some time around 15-16 years old, Minecraft became popular in my school. This was what tipped me over to more traditional programming, because there was already a modding community which provided tools for easy deobfuscation of its classes. Instead of revising for GCSEs, I made a small number of mods including elemental creepers which became popular enough to earn a small amount of ad revenue. Something like £20-30 a month for nearly 2 years wasn't great money, but as a kid it maintained my phone contract and a library of games on steam to play.

EDIT: Can't forget Ludum Dare, switching from Java to C# after my first LD experience improved my programming a lot even though the languages have a lot of similarities.

Sure, kids these days may not just happen to stumble upon the code of a game by opening its BASIC file in a text editor, but with curiosity and the internet it is very easy to begin learning from a young age. For me, this all started ~11 years ago, but I'm sure everything I did with my curiosity is still possible for kids today.