Superficially, HTML Canvas drawing is very similar. (Also, many people taught themselves programming because they wanted to make Flash animations. )
Back in the 8-bit micro days, the commercial games and other software were largely single person efforts. The beauty was that you could teach yourself some BASIC and very easily create something which was at least sorta close to the state-of-the-art.
I think to really hook kids on the idea, you need to have some platform which seems current (e.g. web or mobile) versus an 1980s-style box.
Back in the 8-bit micro days, the commercial games and other software were largely single person efforts. The beauty was that you could teach yourself some BASIC and very easily create something which was at least sorta close to the state-of-the-art.
I think to really hook kids on the idea, you need to have some platform which seems current (e.g. web or mobile) versus an 1980s-style box.