Programming

When I was a kid, we had a class on Logo in, I think, 4th grade? (It was either that or 5th grade.) It wasn't particularly hard to make various geometric drawings with it, but it also wasn't clear how to use it to do anything beyond that.

I used to tinker with Visual Basic on the school's computer lab at recess sometimes around then. One of the people who ran the lab showed me just enough to try to make a calculator UI (e.g. push number buttons and have it add numbers to the display) but didn't really explain the principles enough for me to get further than that. (I think he loaned me a book on BASIC that I tried to read on the school bus, but I couldn't get very far with it at that age.) I ran into a macro virus back then as well, and I was able to understand the logic for erasing files on a particular date when it was pointed out, but I wasn't able to make something like that or analyze it myself at that age.

I also tinkered with HyperCard and some other creative software at home at around that age. I did not understand HyperTalk but could do a few simple things. I also stumbled into AppleScript but didn't understand it. I think I recorded macros with it, and tried to modify what it spat out without much success. I remember running into something about timezone conversion that was really cryptic to me as a kid -- that might have been the first time I encountered the term "GMT"? There's a lot of little things like that which will trip up a young beginner...

I think I also checked out a book on Java from the library that had a CD-ROM with the compiler on it somewhere in that 4th~6th grade age range (don't remember more specifically when) -- I was definitely too young to for that. I was able to install the software, type in a program from the book, and make it run but I wasn't able to do anything beyond that with it and it was too tedious for me to persevere through the cryptic parts when I was that young.

Somewhere around 5th ~ 6th grade I found Game Maker and taught myself that by tinkering with the sample games. For example, by making alternative level layouts for the Pac-Man clone and adding in some simple things like one-way teleporters. I used the drag and drop interface at that age with one of the really early versions before the 4.0 UI re-design -- it was a lot more approachable as a beginner, IMO, before that redesign. (With the changes it was better for me as a hobbyist as I got older though.) I eventually taught myself how to use its scripting language through a mixture of reading the manual and trial-and-error. The manual didn't explain the basics of programming very well, but the reference documentation for it was easy enough to understand that once I got a handle on the basics I could do a lot with it. I'm not sure how old I was when I got a good handle on it. Maybe 7th or 8th grade? I was able to make some fairly complex things from scratch by 9th grade and taught myself C++ in high school.

I definitely could've learned a lot more conceptually earlier if I'd had more direct mentoring from someone who could code; I had to figure out a lot by trial and error. My knowledge of math, reading ability, etc. limited my ability to self-teach from books. People around me were also rarely able to answer questions when I hit something above my expected grade level (e.g. I remember asking what "sigma" meant to a math teacher in 7th grade after encountering it in a book and she didn't really understand my question and told me it was another variable like x instead of recognizing that I was asking about summations but didn't know that word yet... I eventually made the connection between it and for loops but I could've understood it then if I'd had the vocabulary to ask the right questions or had the sample text handy when I asked...) In retrospect, I'm surprised at how bad my teachers in high school were when I tried to get help with figuring out how to move things in circles in a game I was writing -- that was all just basic trig.

I guess to summarize: if they're motivated, yeah, you can get a surprisingly long way very young.