We humans are story telling species. RPG in Box is what got my 12 year old son interested in programing. Not python. Not AI. My son wants to tell stories and let others experience his stories. Programing is just a means to an end.
I think humans can have different motivations. For your son, it seems to be this.
When I was 12, I originally wanted to make video games, but found that I just loved building things and felt like programming was a magical toolbox. For me, it's not a means to an end, but the journey I actually like - I'm a builder, not a storyteller.
When I give short talks at schools about game dev I try to make it super clear that we are all born game designers. We all make up games as children and a large part of that is story telling.
Every child has seen a face in a cloud and 'designed' something outside of themselves. This is where teachers are amazing. Teachers know how to nurture that against the pressure of society crushing it.
It was python+pygame that got one of my kids to learn to program and minecraft modding that got another to learn. Neither code now but that wasn't the point.
"Every child has seen a face in a cloud and 'designed' something outside of themselves. This is where teachers are amazing."
Hm. My teachers rather stopped me from looking outside the window to see faces in the clouds and placed me on a seat far away from any window so I could fully focus on the less interesting topics at hand, that society demands that I know. (Yet when I was succesfully done with all that schools, I found that I learned very little of practical value from my higher education anyway)
A few years ago I took a class of middle schoolers through a simple game dev course and rarely have I seen a group of kids so motivated. Using microStudio[1] they built the story, art, music, gameplay, and levels - I only helped a bit with the code. They kept asking about it long afterwards, so I eventually threw it up on a static site: http://uprag.quest (warning - flashy jump scares)
