[habosa]

This article did an excellent job verbalizing the incredible feeling of mental potency one gets when learning to program. When you see that first "Hello, World!", you are hooked. I still get this feeling whenever I learn a new platform. When I learned Android I was amazed that I had made a real-life app run on my phone. When I learned Ruby on Rails I proudly stuck my flag in the surface of the internet and declared myself ruler of my domain (pun intentded). When I learned to program an Arduino I felt my code-laden tendrils inching out into the real world: that light is blinking because I demanded it do so!

This is why i'd like to teach programming to kids. I really don't care if they continue with it or ever learn how to do anything useful, I just want to expose everyone to that feeling of power you can get when you're behind a keyboard and in front of the right tools. It makes you think you can do something amazing, and everyone should have a chance to feel that.

[saraid216]

The desire to empower kids is basically one of the best motivations available to everyone. I'd recommend poking around for after school programs where you can volunteer to do it. I spent a month or two teaching HTML to a small group of middle schoolers and it was easily one of my favorite experiences in life.

[tbomb]

It's such a great feeling. My favorite part is how, no matter how long you've been doing it for, you still get that feeling time and time again.

[lostlogin]

That bit is good. Fixing a bug that has haunted you is even better. Everything I've ever made is pathetically simple, so I can't imaging how good it must feel to fix something that is actually complicated.