I think it's a shame Codecademy (to the best of my knowledge) hasn't incorporated some more visual lessons into its tutorials by changing the CSS for HTML elements or by using Canvas. There are a lot of lessons with numerical loops which might be livened up for beginners if the loops moved some coloured circles around a canvas, say.

Personally, as a teenager I read some C books but never wrote more than the 10-line examples in the books until I discovered the Allegro graphics/game library and realised that I had all the tools I needed to make a Tetris clone, a 2d platform game, a software synthesiser... (none of which I ever finished, but oh well!)

edit: I meant the Codecademy Javascript classes; obviously they have static CSS and HTML classes too, but last time I looked there were no tutorials to use JS to animate a web page. Maybe there are now or will be soon.

Better yet, Lua, which has fewer syntactic oddities. One of my big misgivings about Python is significant white space, which I suspect is weird for people used to word processors, not plain text.

Check out NodeBox: http://nodebox.net

There is pyprocessing, probably others: http://code.google.com/p/pyprocessing/

Check out Turtle: http://docs.python.org/library/turtle.html

pygame works well for this.