Nobody Wants to Learn How to Program
Can anyone with kids comment on whether or not computers are even exciting and empowering anymore?When I was eight, we got a Commodore VIC-20.  It plugged into the TV and booted into BASIC.  Just running PRINT statements and simple loops was unbelievably cool.  I learned key positions (and how easily mistakes are made) by spending hours typing in bytecodes printed in magazines.  With any luck, at the en of it, a completely unforeseen game would appear.Getting to play with Logo on the Apple ][e was awesome, too.  Shapes and angles and horribly flickering animations were exciting.Now, it seems to me that the difference between Dive Into Python (or whatever) and Call of Duty are so immense, that even running Hello World would be a disheartening experience.  But maybe I'm just too nostalgic.Incidentally, I distinctly remember from my first proper high school programming course (Pascal) that the instructor asked why we wanted to learn programming.  Every single student responded, "to make games."