Had a programming class in high school in which the teacher gave us a lot of free time to work on whatever interested us. I made dozens of games in Java during that time, mostly pretty simple ones, but by senior year I had written a sort-of advanced ray casting engine (Think Wolfenstein 3D but with textured floors and a fully-rendered ceiling layer) and I worked with two of my friends to develop it into a sci-fi RPG that we entered into a Game Development competition.
There was a definite moment in high school where I realized that I liked programming, and not just making games with it, and decided that I'd study computer science at university.
I don't think my experience is typical for my demographic, however.
Had a programming class in high school in which the teacher gave us a lot of free time to work on whatever interested us. I made dozens of games in Java during that time, mostly pretty simple ones, but by senior year I had written a sort-of advanced ray casting engine (Think Wolfenstein 3D but with textured floors and a fully-rendered ceiling layer) and I worked with two of my friends to develop it into a sci-fi RPG that we entered into a Game Development competition.
There was a definite moment in high school where I realized that I liked programming, and not just making games with it, and decided that I'd study computer science at university.
I don't think my experience is typical for my demographic, however.