[primitivesuave]

These are awesome pointers. I especially agree with your first point about writing verbosely - I would do this all the time when I was teaching kids. I would copy and paste things and write all kinds of hairy logic, so they can see how useful it is to use different syntax and apply some refactoring.

[exe34]

I still do that at 38 - I often write something, copy-paste and edit something, and do it a few times until I figure out exactly what needs looping over. It's not always clear if you use coding as part of understanding the problem domain.