I can talk from my own experience, as I learned programming at similar age (like 17 years ago) :-)
* I learned with Visual Basic For Applications, because the IDE was bundled with every MS Office installed, so there was no setup required.
* Visual Basic was comprehensible enough for me as a 12yo. I had some basic understanding of programming from my dad showing me basic on some vintage Yamaha computer with arabic OS [1], so IF-ELSE, PRINT, GOTO 10, but couldn't code yet :P
* I remember that the path to hello world in VBA was fairly straight forward. It didn't take too much of typing to get a MessageBox with "Hello World" on screen. I think after that we were writing few programs with multiple messages after each other telling a short story or something.
* I remember after first few lections, we enabled the 'option explicit' that enabled some rudimentary type-checking (or was it just requiring explicit variable declaration?) and I didn't like it at first, but after it started catching typos in my variable names, I grew to like it :) Static/dynamic typing proponents take that for what you want.
* I remember we mostly did simple text-based programming. Million Message boxes and Input boxes. Simple quizes. Simple verbal puzzles. Simple calculators (no parsing, you entered first number in input box, then operator in second input box, then second number in third input box, and finally answer in message box would appear.) Making poem generators was fun. Maybe some simple text-based adventures. I remember having fun :) I think it took us half a year or more to start working on some graphics and making simple games?
* the learning was pretty hands on. We were a group of 5 to 10 kids in a class, everybody was trying to do the same assignment.
* I remember it took me a while to realise I could do "x = x + 1" in my code and what that meant :D In math (we already were solving simple linear equations at school), it wouldn't compute. Functional-programming proponents, take that for what you want :-)
[1] https://www.msx.org/wiki/Sakhr_AX-350II