Be fair to yourself, kids have a much easier time working in a 3D digital space. I found kids did a lot better jumping straight into blender so I started skipping Tinkercad when teaching my 3D printing classes. It’s just like a video game to them so they understand it pretty quick.
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I started designing with Google Sketchup (there’s an STL export plugin). Later, I began using more OpenSCAD because of my programming background and the advantages of parametric design. OpenSCAD is also the engine behind Thingiverse’s Customizer, so being able to share easily modifiable models is nice.
I also use TinkerCAD, especially if I want to tweak an STL for which a higher-level representation is not available. I like it’s subtraction and union features which make stretching and merging parts of STL models easier to visualize and execute.
Note that I make mostly practical engineer-type models (tools, cases, parts, etc) - not organic, flowing models (trees, monsters, people, et al). None of the above tools are well suited for that latter class of models.
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