Really interesting. My first highschool programming class was exactly the same and also during the late 90s. We learned QBasic and created a choose your own adventure game. (My class was actually taught by a math teacher who barely knew QBasic) I also took the advanced classes later which were VB and then C++ and did notice a significant drop off. But, I still enjoyed it.

Did we go to the same high school? :) I wonder how common that class structure was back then.