[mrkentutbabi]

You only need to spend time teaching a few semesters to have this belief completely turned upside down.

I know, because it happened to me.

[Retric]

That wasn’t just a guess, the logo thing was from actual experience.

I have also known people that learned to code over a decade that needed to copy peoples homework to get through collage. One spent a long time setting up and troubleshooting network routers before things clicked. Another learned via increasingly complex sysadmin scripts, until he fell in a pure programming job.

Meanwhile a coworker of mine had a philosophy degree but two programming courses where more than enough to get him productive.

[mrkentutbabi]

Seems you were having some good students. Try to teach in some community college or low income area.

[groone]

People cannot code if you ask them to do something they don't understand.

I have seen people who have none of step, if and loop basics nailed down sitting in C++ class and be very frustrated why nothing they do is "correct". They hope get lucky and get their program right by throwing some things at the wall. That is because they have never experienced successfully putting multiple simple steps together in a list to achieve something meaningful.

Play some kid games where you need to put in steps, if statements and loops to move some character around obstacles. Need to give time to intuitively understand and develop curiosity about what is possible next. Then learn what is an API and what can be done when interacting with those. Then go to overview of a code file, variables and Hello world.

When people are clueless and you say it is "simple" - It is over. Few minutes later their brain starts blocking everything that looks like code to preserve their ego and they lose all interest.

That is result of skipping basics not giving a week to feel good about successfully playing some game with steps, ifs and loops. Going forward while still clueless and before interest for next step is in place.