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My kids LOVE making spreadsheets. They use it to track points in various competitions and games and stuff like that. The script is actually a good entry point into programming too (simple stuff like SUM and AVERAGE, and constants like $A$1 or whatever).

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While there's good things for a kid to learn from spreadsheets, it might also do harm because it's so dissimilar to "the real thing".

It's like when students learn MatLab. While much closer to regular software engineering than spreadsheets, it is still different enough for all the wrong basic concepts to sneak in and manifest. Switching to a classic programming language afterwards might actually be harder that way (not only learn all the new stuff, but unlearn/unlink the old stuff).

I also loved making spreadsheets as a kid. I remember I'd get books about dinosaurs and add information about them to a sheet - latin name, size, height, etc. IIRC my dad accidentally deleted the file at some point, or it got lost somehow.

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