I taught myself to program when I was 11, using GameMaker, which had this neat scripting language called GML that hooked into the editor to control things above and beyond the simple actions built in.

Learning about functions and variables made algebra ezpz when we learnt it later on. Matrices were multidimensional arrays (I know, not quite the same in terms of maths, but hey I was young).

More importantly, programming taught me how to approach logical problems the correct way. I'm super thankful for it :)