We do game night every week. She's taking piano and plays the Trombone. She's in girl scouts as well doing yoga and joining ski club.
She's not isolated in any way. We engage with her every moment she wants to be engaged. I'm not asking her to go to college with these skills, I'm trying to find fun ways of challenging her even more with her current interests.
I do believe between this post and the others saying Kano is good has helped me choose one of her Christmas gifts this year. I'm glad so many here have had good experiences with it.
I actually had something similar happen, as posted in a different response, I have a couple of minecraft servers I run for the girls. One day I went through online minecraft schematics and tossed in a few castles, homes, a roller coaster and a pyramid maze and when they found them a few days later they were amazed. Even more so when I showed them how I got them there.
In this case, anything engaging, which in general for a kid mostly means games. I've done board game design with my kids, having them design a board game that we all play on game night. That was fun, although I found is quite unfair that if you're over 20 years old you start with no rerolls and if you're a girl you get 3 extra re-rolls. The girls of course felt that was perfectly fair...
As I posted earlier in thread, my goal is to take what they enjoy doing and attempting to broaden their focus a bit into useful life skills. Non programming example: My older daughter loves cookies. We started with teaching her how to assist making cookies, moved on to her making cookies for us, and from there she's moved on to making dinner, etc. She's 12, but able to pull open a cookbook and throw together a decent 30 minute meal.
That might be a little simple of an example, but my goal with them playing minecraft is similar. Get them to mod the game they enjoy, get to them to learn the stuff that goes on behind the scenes and it lets them determine if it's something they enjoy doing.
Very valid question on her desires. Up until I got this course on modding minecraft what she wanted to do was "Play Minecraft". I am strongly of the opinion that my children need not only time to play, but that it's a good idea in general to make that play something that they can build on in the future. If she gets her "Play Minecraft" and I get my "She's learning a life skill at the same time" it's a valid redirection of her energy IMO.
Now Java itself may or may not be a useful skill in the future, but the thought process behind the programming at this point I believe is most important.
As for the eclipse part, the online course she's using has presented it well. In the first part of the course she's learning some about syntax, but mostly doing some art in gimp, typing in names to make things be named differently and editing code that already exists.
Without life, Biology itself would be impossible.