Making it easy to learn is the complete opposite of the point here. We WANT it to be a challenge to learn, and to have good documentation for them to look things up in. That makes them learn HOW to program, as well as HOW to look up things they may not know yet. If it's just "Oh, click this blue button, then this red button, and suddenly I have a 'class' object I can drag around..." then you're not really teaching them anything useful.
I vividly remember how much fun it was to write chat or game programs for the TI- series, and I even once went as far as to write a chat program and later build a wireless(IR) connector system to 'pass notes' with friends in class. In all honesty, I believe that TI was the first computer I ever owned that was 100% mine.
It came with a basic-like language to program in(my new one accepts ASM as well), which is perfect for beginners, and the owner's manual was a 100-page tome of useful information on commands, programming, graphing, variables and data, etc. I think I learned more about math from that calculator and manual than from any of the nonsense homework the teachers gave.