I have actually taught 14 year olds when I worked as an IT manager at a school. We have about 5-6 who were interested in Linux. Once day one of them came to me and asked to be taught how to program. I took the decision to teach python, simply because it was so simple, and encouraged clean code writing, unlike most other languages;)
The upshot, by about the 3rd lesson, being entirely theoretical, I had them understanding classes by using an analogy of an office block, with offices being class instances, functions the people in the offices, variables being paper with data on them, and blueprints for the offices being class declarations.
The next week, one of the guys came up to me and showed me a 200 line program. He's started writing a text-based adventure game. He had a few syntax errors. After sorting that the program had grown to 400 lines by lunchtime. I was both impressed and touched that I had been able to teach this young mind the basics. We did one practical lesson. All the rest was theoretical, which goes to prove you don't ALWAYS need practical lessons.
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I have actually taught 14 year olds when I worked as an IT manager at a school. We have about 5-6 who were interested in Linux. Once day one of them came to me and asked to be taught how to program. I took the decision to teach python, simply because it was so simple, and encouraged clean code writing, unlike most other languages ;)
The upshot, by about the 3rd lesson, being entirely theoretical, I had them understanding classes by using an analogy of an office block, with offices being class instances, functions the people in the offices, variables being paper with data on them, and blueprints for the offices being class declarations.
The next week, one of the guys came up to me and showed me a 200 line program. He's started writing a text-based adventure game. He had a few syntax errors. After sorting that the program had grown to 400 lines by lunchtime. I was both impressed and touched that I had been able to teach this young mind the basics. We did one practical lesson. All the rest was theoretical, which goes to prove you don't ALWAYS need practical lessons.