Building on Seymour Papert's view of empowering students by mastering programming, this study conceptualized programming empowerment as consisting of four components: meaningfulness, impact, creative self-efficacy, and programming self-efficacy. A sample of 287 primary school students in grades four to six completed a corresponding survey. Confirmatory factor analysis validated the proposed components of the programming empowerment instrument. A structural equation model indicated that students with greater interest in programming perceived it as more meaningful, had greater impact, had greater creative self-efficacy, and had greater programming self-efficacy. Also, students with attitudes toward collaboration that were more positive than others had greater creative self-efficacy. Boys showed more interest in programming than girls did. Students in higher grade levels than others viewed programming as less meaningful and had lower programming self-efficacy. These results support future studies that evaluate the impacts of interest-driven computational thinking and programming curricula with ample collaboration opportunities. •Empowerment consists of meaningfulness, impact, creative and programming self-efficacy.•The study validated the programming empowerment instrument.•Students with greater interest in programming perceive greater empowerment.•Students with positive collaboration attitude have greater creative self-efficacy.•Students in senior grades viewed programming as less meaningful than junior grades.