My gut response would be to point them towards Codecademy. IMO, its a great way to align learning and building for a complete novice. It's also served as a refresher for me over the years.
While there are plenty of ways to jump right in and start building right away, and much can be learned through that approach, it might not be best for newcomers with no base knowledge to grow. The only time I can partially relate was when I wanted to build a mobile app, decided on Flutter (for whatever reasons at the time in late 2018), and bought a Udemy course. After following along for a few basic apps, I was motivated and ready to go build what I wanted. Starting small proved that it wasn't impossible, yet I did have 20 yrs experience in tech and understood how things worked - just not the language. And I still would not consider myself a programmer, but I have now built a mobile app.
Most of my experience is with infrastructure and networking, and anytime I hired a new engineer their first task would always be to create diagrams for the network. Gives them something they can easily do and makes them familiar with the network they will need to maintain. A seed of confidence in knowing what they are working on helped them ramp up more quickly. Plus I could gauge the depth of their knowledge by what they produce.
Haptic learning is a great way to start, and Codecademy fits the bill IMO.
Based on this, I'm surprised your suggestion isn't to start out by diagraming out the product. I feel like if you had one day, that might have more value than the time spent in a gamified sandbox.
My gut response would be to point them towards Codecademy. IMO, its a great way to align learning and building for a complete novice. It's also served as a refresher for me over the years.
While there are plenty of ways to jump right in and start building right away, and much can be learned through that approach, it might not be best for newcomers with no base knowledge to grow. The only time I can partially relate was when I wanted to build a mobile app, decided on Flutter (for whatever reasons at the time in late 2018), and bought a Udemy course. After following along for a few basic apps, I was motivated and ready to go build what I wanted. Starting small proved that it wasn't impossible, yet I did have 20 yrs experience in tech and understood how things worked - just not the language. And I still would not consider myself a programmer, but I have now built a mobile app.
Most of my experience is with infrastructure and networking, and anytime I hired a new engineer their first task would always be to create diagrams for the network. Gives them something they can easily do and makes them familiar with the network they will need to maintain. A seed of confidence in knowing what they are working on helped them ramp up more quickly. Plus I could gauge the depth of their knowledge by what they produce.
Haptic learning is a great way to start, and Codecademy fits the bill IMO.
Based on this, I'm surprised your suggestion isn't to start out by diagraming out the product. I feel like if you had one day, that might have more value than the time spent in a gamified sandbox.