I agree, there are a lot of people who don't learn that well like that. Visual programming makes it a bit more approachable but whether or not it helps learn beyond the first couple lessons (or is overkill) -- I'm not sure. With a lot of these early concepts I feel like just getting one or two reference points can start a snowball effect. Eg. Tell a philosophy student that object orientation is like Plato's Theory of Forms.

From personal experience however I still would argue that just building something is the surest way to go because it requires you to follow through.

After about 2 years of programming full time, I started to develop a sense of why and when things would go wrong up and down the stack, and I don't really think it's something you can teach. It's something you get from loads of accumulated practice -- eg. Oh that's how indices work in Oracle vs MySQL, dynamic proxies on Groovy methods don't work when called from Java, I just built this but now I see I can refactor and save tons of code next time, what are kwargs in python, etc.

I've tested out little one offs like try mongodb, try redis, or interactive js tutorials, but I forget what I've just learned until I need to build something on my own.