My little experience in this domain is that, whenever you want to use CC copyrighted stuff, the easiest way is to contact the author, and try to obtain dual-licensing. GPL & CC. It is often not a problem for many artists will choose CC just because it sounds more appropriated for artwork than a plain GPL, but are not fondamentaly opposed to the terms of the GPL. Having their work travel along free software projects but remain GPL'ed scares them a lot less than being used by Vice Corp., famous company backed by the RIAA. As a side note, the other problem with CC is that there are IMHO too many CC flavors, so saying "this is CC" is not of great information, you need the exact licence, they can be really different. As a conclusion -> yes, I confirm, the hot stuff in games is the artwork, you'll always find a fool to code nearly any game engine.

I used to be one of those, started at age 11 with Basic, was playing with assembly at age 13. IMHO at that age you need things to be fun - it might be true at any age but a young teenager will just ignore something too boring - so choose whatever language you want, but make sure the kids get to actually code something that *does* things. Writing abstract stuff on paper is no good when you're young, CS gives the amazing opportunity to actually build real world things through a simple keyboard, once you've got this, rare are those that can resist the appeal of being a local virtual God who can rule and command its own little world. A good example of working programs that *do* things are small casual games, any old-school cheap cellular phone game fits. Technology does not really matter, wether you hack in it JavaScript, Python+SDL, Java, C++, whatever, will not make any difference.

In low-level imperative programming (C language for instance) what you say is perfectly true but a more advanced programming language which features, for instance, closures (any functional language such as Lisp, but Perl and others can fit too), allows you to manipulate statefull functions. You get to work on a function which is bound to a given set of data. This is, I admit, different from the usual OO model: a set of data with functions^Wmethods bounds to it. But I wouldn't claim those models are absolute opposites ;)