>I discovered this when first learning how to program. The textbooks never worked; it all only started to click when I started to do little projects for myself. The project wasn’t just motivation but an organizing principle, a magnet to arrange the random iron filings I picked up along the way. I’d care to learn about some abstract concept, like “memoization,” because I needed it to solve my problem; and these concepts would lose their abstractness in the light of my example.

I think that's why we see people who've learned to program before college get that much more mileage from their courses

They're not smarter, they've just faced the problems we're trying to solve, which gives them the motivation to care about the solutions they're presented with