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I have a very similar experience with "Teach the kids to code". When i was in 5th grade our school bought a couple of computers and started teaching Logo(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo_%28programming_language%29). It was simple little language, and all of us were excited cause we could make computer draw something for us.

After that the curriculum for the higher standards moved more towards the MSOffice, Lotus123 stuff which really bored me out, so i moved my interest to physics.

Incidentally i was drawn back to computers for playing games(not programming), students exchange lot of pirated games. My curiosity with the computer was back when one of the games was not working on my dads PC. I had to learn about exe, dll(apparently games needed many of these strange little files), Direct X, opengl, screen resolution, and lot more stuff.

Before i knew it, many of friends needed my help to troubleshoot their PCs, which game me lot of PCs to do my hardware/software experiments with :). And i gradually moved myself to programming again.

My final year CS projects was a warehouse management system using RFID and Java. From Logo to Java it took me 10 years, it may be a slow growth according to HN standards, but teaching kids the wrong stuff will really turn them away.

Its not that we don't have the right tools to teach kids how to code, its that (as usual) we don't have the right teachers. I taught myself/was taught by my brother when I was in 6th grade. In high school, I took the compSci AP (and spent about half the time taking a nap). The year after that, I took the 1 programming class my school offered, which was a project based intro to programming (with an awesome teacher who made sure I got something out of the class).

What struck me about the class was the way it was taught. We used Java (actually, Processing [1]). In most of the early lectures (which there weren't many of), he would say 'for now, this is just syntax, it will make sense later' instead of explaining the more advanced concepts needed to understand why we write certain things. The main flow of the course was (I am inventing the details): Calling a function tells the computer to do something. Here is a bunch of drawing functions, make a picture. Then, using that he would ask students to make minor changes, like shift the entire thing 5 pixels. Then he would introduce variables and assignments. Using that, he would ask them to draw parallel lines. Then, he would introduce loops. Then he had them make a bouncing ball simulator (just 2 balls) Then he introduced objects

Every time a new concept was introduced, its use and benefit was clear because people had already seen the code duplication that it solves. After the initial lessons (which only took about a month), the class was pretty much entirely project based, where we were given (loose) guidelines and had to design and code a program.

Most of the time spent in that class was problem solving. Because math is an incredibly powerful problem solving tool, much of that time was spent doing math. But it was spent using math as a tool to solve a larger problem.

After (and during) that class, many of the other students (whom had never coded prior to taking the class) asked me for advice on programs they were writing that were completely unrelated to the class.

So, it is quiet possible to teach kids how to code without scaring them off. It generally helps if you don't show them pointers, or bit shifting, or linking, ETC until they are ready.

[1]http://processing.org/

> I'm now glad no one ever introduced me to coding when I was a kid.

I wouldn't throw out the "learn to code" baby with the "poor rote education" bathwater. Clearly that's a bad approach and is pervasive throughout schools around the world, and we need to stop it. There are many ways to learn how to code, and we're constantly developing better ways to educate millions of kids (I hope). But asking programmers today the best way is survivor bias -- many/most of us are self-motivated and had to learn large portions of what we know on our own.

I wouldn't give up on your niece, either. Different people are motivated differently, and timing matters, too. She needs to find the right itch, and she'll soon learn to scratch it.

> There are many ways to learn how to code, and we're constantly developing better ways to educate millions of kids

Making it a compulsory part of education does not seem to be a "better" way to do it. Let's not push things that will be useless to most kids until they develop some interest for it, or for solving problems in general. Then you can bring programming as one tool to help solve issues, in a better/faster/cheaper fashion. Programming for the sake of programming has no meaning, just like we are being taught Math for the sake of Math. Education needs to be way more tangible and down-to-earth, at least for younger children.