Comment by empressplay

It's important to remember that the exercise of teaching children coding isn't so much about teaching them how to code, but how to think, how to plan, predict, conjecture, reason and so forth. It's just a convenient and quicker way of teaching these things than the alternatives.

If they have a good foundation in these things, then if they choose to go on to coding later they can learn all of the minutiae. But I've found in teaching it is important to stress that learning basic coding is _not_ about steering them towards coding as a career, or even a pursuit.

It _is_ important to stress that learning basic coding will help them become better problem solvers, better able to anticipate issues and mitigate them. And that this is useful to them in a wide variety of areas in which they may have interest, such as sports, engineering, adventuring etc. And yes, also learning how to guide an LLM.

So once you get those fundamentals down in the context of coding (Scratch, GameMaker, Logo, BASIC are all fine here), go practice them in more real-world applications. Those are the skills you need to foster, not object-oriented programming. And if they take an interest in going further with coding, then that's fine. They will have the tools they need to do that.