BTW, I'm the OP and I'm 38, I started with Logo on Apple II's at the Library, but I'm wondering if there's something more we should be doing to help kids get into this stuff.
We did have to do a lot of Googling (we were only ever shown how to make a play button), but I don't think its very different from what Codify is trying to offer. After we had most of the basic programming control structures down and learned some of Flash's features (ActionScript 1 was very easy to use) we were off making games.
In hindsight, you are right. Simply having the programming environment to do whatever we wanted helped us learn. I remember we jumped into networking to create online versions of our games. However I am not sure if there is a way to recreate that push - we simply got into it because we spent so much time on sites like Newgrounds and armor games.