Can kids under 10 be possibly taught coding, without even mentioning the word syntax to them ?

When I was a kid, we had a class on Logo in, I think, 4th grade? (It was either that or 5th grade.) It wasn’t particularly hard to make various geometric drawings with it, but it also wasn’t clear how to use it to do anything beyond that.

This sums up my early experiences with programming. It felt like either pointless flashing lights or building the universe from scratch. These days I have lots of tasks that programming is useful for but for the longest time no sources I encountered ever seemed to talk about what practical use I could put the concepts to.

Telling me about for and while loops and various other things felt like learning by rote and I never got very far. It wasn’t until my late 20s when I had a load of tedious administrative tasks to do that I was able to get my teeth into programming.