While learning piano, no one wants to sit in a room playing scales over and over. They want to play Claire De Lune. Programming is similar in that it can be an art but it is first and foremost a skill. You need to struggle with boring parts until you figure out that you can actually make very cool things...but first you need to learn about loops and variables.
But you can teach new techniques in the context of full pieces, gradually introducing them, to great effect. This is the whole premise behind the Suzuki method of music education, and it's highly effective in cultivating not only technical proficiency but also musicality -- and in young kids, at that (it also substantially improved the musicality in piano playing for my wife, who is obviously an adult)
