When I was growing up I got the chance to learn some coding with my older brother. We had a Commodore VIC-20 and were able to program in the BASIC programming language. It was tedious, not documented well, and was very unfriendly to learn. Now days there are a lot of languages geared for kids learning to program. It is a great skill to have, and the nature of programming can be applied to many different life areas and problems.
Dylan wanted to share a link to some more information about programming that is specifically geared for kids. One of those links is to the scratch language, it is a great system, and my kids have all had a go at it and had a lot of fun. Thanks Dylan! Thanks also to Barbara and the whole class at SLCCN!