[komali2]

Almost every old wizard-level programmer I've talked to started off by being massively inspired by the ability to program games when they were kids.

A teaching technique as old as teaching - find something the kid is actively interested in and excited about, and sneakily teach them stuff using that.

[noir_lord]

Not wizard-level but I got started programming on a ZX-81 (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8a/Si...)

Which was a few years old then, the games such as they where never held any interest but a machine that could be told what to do was magic to me.

I could write programs on a ZX Speccy before I could read (properly) and that started a life-long love (and career) in software development.