You make a very valid point here. At younger ages its not so much about learning to program, but learning computational thinking. We have also done an "unplugged" event where the kids would be outside in groups doing all sorts of physical games which all stimulate this. I will write up a post about this soon :).
Please also bear in mind that at clubs such as CoderDojo, kids meet other likeminded kids and develop relationships there as well. At my dojo for example 2 guys met for the first time and now they are best friends and make money with a minecraft server they built themselves!