Gamification is a gimmick that can add value when the people are already engaged, but you can't make people interested in education because you can get points or win a badge. They had to want to be there in the first place.
Some fields lend themselves to domain experts who can write software making large leaps in productivity, but many do not. There are a lot of desirable skills I'd prefer the education system teach before Python. In the end, I think you want a society where anyone with the need or interest can go learn it on their own. This presents a huge educational challenge that we should try to fix as best we can, but this problem will never be completely solved. We should use our resources to improve things as best we can.
how about paying real money as points. money has been shown to motivate students to learn. gamification is not a gimmick, it is a rephrasing of an old idea - feedback. all animals operate on instant/constant feedback. it's only in humans that the ability to operate without this is present, and it's a mistake to force everyone, including to children to operate in this feedbackless manner.
With regards to python, the low hanging fruit out there is just a few lines/hundred lines of python away. If everyone out there thought and acted like a programmer, so much inefficiency would be squeezed out that it would be equivalent to another industrial revolution.
Some fields lend themselves to domain experts who can write software making large leaps in productivity, but many do not. There are a lot of desirable skills I'd prefer the education system teach before Python. In the end, I think you want a society where anyone with the need or interest can go learn it on their own. This presents a huge educational challenge that we should try to fix as best we can, but this problem will never be completely solved. We should use our resources to improve things as best we can.