Depends on what you are doing. If you're trying to teach Van Emde Boas trees, then yeah without coding no one will like to work on that, but there are so many insightful topics.

One example would be modal logic. There is something inherently attractive about reasoning about time. Once you put it into context, it is very difficult to not find it inspiring.

I did my first programming with pencil and paper, and I'm still engaged 30+ years later

We're talking about high school here though. Seems to me it would be like running a chemistry class without doing any lab work.

I agree. One of the most magic moments when you start programming is when you write your first program that does a truly significant amount of work. You run it, you're still kind of on human time scale and think it's going to take a few seconds, but it finishes instantly. That was the moment that really hooked me into programming.

Not trying to be argumentative or anything, but that's how chemistry is taught in 3rd world countries. Labs are a luxury :)

Eh fair, although RPi Zeros are pretty cheap these days :).

And rural America :)