Actually, I was a bit old for that... but I was one of the teenagers that was selected by Bell Labs to make my own NPN transistor... They provided everything I needed including a 2” diameter silicon wafer, the doping chemicals (which I had to mix correctly), and a lot of theoretical texts that I had to extract HOW out of. It worked. The following year, I was selected to build a voice simulator... Wow... by changing capacitors I could get it to say AAAAHHHHH, EEEEEEHHHHH, OOOOOHHHHH, UUUUUUH, Ihhhhh. etc. Consonants were beyond it.
Well, my initial experience was that $50,000 “training computer” in our high school, in which there was no monitor, just red lights, indicating the state of the registers, a TTY to input and output and paper tape to save programming. We basically invented our own language, on the fly, as we programmed, using whatever pneumonics that we invented as we went along for the base 2, but Hexadecimal was useful too, as it would get tiresome writing all those 1 and 2s... LOL... (and very mistake-prone, too... of course...).
My first experience on the “real computers” was the GE TimeShare computer in Seattle, that was tied in with a university in Portland, where I was at. We also used TTYs for that, and dialed up the computer in Seattle from the TTY and connected. I learned BASIC on it (the “computer” taught me through its own tutorial program). I had reams and reams of rolled paper from that one... LOL...
After that, it was down to Oregon State and their computing center and learning FORTRAN, ALGOL, OSCAR (something used on campus and a specialized language, “Oregon State Conversational Aid to Research”). At that time, I carried stacks of punch cards in to the computing center to be ‘run” and would come back later to see what happened... :-)