Some people can be taught to write code, however far fewer can be taught to or have the natural ability to problem solve. This is the 'art' aspect behind software development that I feel the 'teach everyone to code' approach overlooks. With any creative field there is a huge amount of 'prior art' that exists and that is also constantly evolving, and the more of this you are at least aware of or - better still - capable of reproducing, the better you will be able to express yourself / problem solve with software.

I hope I am not alone in feeling that looking at the code of a well-engineered and well-structured project can be quite the artistic-appreciation experience, and that this experience always leaves you with some piece of knowledge and understanding you didn't have beforehand.

I know that I learned the basics of chaining things together to get an effect by experimenting on my own in QBasic; basic graphics and audio were super easy, so I could also experiment with the difference between internal data state and how to represent that state.

When I started a directed education, learning new programming concepts always expanded the set of problems that I could solve. Learning how to reason through them didn't come separately, it came through writing programs of increasing complexity over time.

Before learning any meaningful amount of programming, I was introduced to the idea of examining the capabilities of your available tools and using them to find creative solutions...with adventure games.

I would consider a curiosity for exploration and experimentation to be central requirements to become a problem solver (at least through the path that I did). Start with that general mindset, present a world for them to explore, introduce them to the tools they can do it with, and there's no way to stop them from that point on.

I don't really know of anyone who learned problem solving with a computer before they learned to code. Supposedly Dijkstra, but that man thought computers cheapened computer science.

I feel like there's so much intrinsic to the code to solve the problem though, like how the debugger works, git bisect / git blame to determine where an issue might have arisen, commenting out lines of code and checking if they cause a particular issue, etc.

I don't think I learnt about problem solving in the abstract, it was more about specific applications of problem solving in the programming world.

Someone gives you a one paragraph description of a feature... I assume you don't immediately open up the debugger and start git bisecting... I'm talking about the things that happen immediately after being presented with a problem, and before you start typing code.