Heck, I'm employed to write code and I'd still rather play games. Just I get paid for the code, and not for playing the games.

But you will do better teaching-wise if you do find something that has intrinsic motivation, not turning it into a chore.

It just might not be the right time! They've basically got until they are 18-20ish to decide to get into it. The programming books my parents gave me after 8th grade never interested me. The 11th grade programming class didn't either. The junior year of college tangentially-related course where I was like "oh I could write a program to help with this homework!" That did the trick for me.

So just keep trying, see if you can find programming-related aspects of other hobbies. And just try to focus on them learning things around those hobbies or obsessions, even if it doesn't seem to have a practical application. Get in the habit of going deep on subjects and practicing learning.

Try a game like Factorio or Satisfactory. Even just Minecraft can be good enough to train their problem solving and critical thinking skills.

They don't need to start with redstone to learn to code. They should play the game and naturally realize that redstone is a way to solve their problem (like making an automatic sliding 2x2 door) and then solve it.

I feel like those skills will take you much further in life because now you have an extra tool to solve problem no matter what field you end up going into. And since programming is so powerful, it's often one of the best tools for the job so kids will naturally pick it up.

The trouble I had in Factorio is that it's deliberately not giving you very powerful tools in order to be a better game. The authors do not want you to skip their fun game by solving a tricky optimisation problem yourself instead.

Not sure if Factorio would work, because I played it and it didn't work for me.

But.... I can finally program.

My feeling, from ~eight years as a mostly-highschool math and science teacher plus parenting as my main work these last few years, is that this motivation to learn is best established very early on, hence my support for universal birth-to-three support (I’m in the USA) in the interest of minimizing adverse childhood experiences (ACEs/trauma) and teaching parents how to cultivate a growth mindset. Intrinsic motivation is powerful. I was not a beneficiary of such care, and have done a lot of re-learning, especially around what I’m feeling, and being okay with not doing “perfect”.

One of the other places birth-to-three programs pay for themselves is to catch physical (e.g. hearing) problems early. That allow for correction and minimizes the affects in learning, reducing cost in later schooling.

> How do you motivate kids, if they rather play games rather than coding (and they even ignore in-game scripted coding such ad Minecraft or Roblox coding)?

Do such kids need to start with regular programming languages? Wouldn't visual languages be a simpler starting point for them to get motivated?