I keep mentioning my daughter’s burgeoning interest here, but I’ve never mentioned what got her hooked. It might make for a future nice-to-have feature.
Before she was comfortable writing or substantially adapting code, I had her “sequencing” animations by drawing pictures. She’d hand off a PNG and we’d blit that through row by row like a fax machine, using the Y axis as time.
I showed her how diagonal stripes created marching ants, and soon enough she was showing off all kinds of colors, curves, and gradients. And one very tall, marching ant telenovela…
Absolute beginner, getting meaningful/delightful results by minute one.
Of course… we were using a Raspberry Pi to do this. I suspect you’d have to scale and spool rows of image data straight out of the Canvas API — as a fundamentally different mode.
But for us it was a cool trick, and a quick win, that stuck. 