Re:Teaching the children (Score 1)

IMHO:
That depends on what you'd like to teach.

<soapbox>

Are you familiar with the works of Alan Kay? He was the guy, who led the Learning Group at Xerox PARC, where Steve Jobs got his ideas from.

Kay's primary idea was, that he would never build a computer, which wasn't usable by a child (see: imagination amplifier).

He developed the idea of an imagination amplifier, a device that would be small and cheap enough that every child could wear one and it would provide an incredible tool for your mind.

Kay is now working at WDI (Walt Disney Imagineering) as a VP of research with most of his core Smalltalk team from PARC, which eventually stopped by at Apple and was strongly involved in the design of the MacOS UI.

</soapbox>

A GUI is an indespensible tool in teaching children what a computer does, but you do not have to use MacOS, there are as well other possibilities, like Squeak Smalltalk (SqC) or LearningWorks (learningworks.neometron.com) if you want to teach children programming.

Both Squeak and Learning Works are based upon Smalltalk, a language that is among the most powerful (if you know The Tricks), but which was initially designed to teach programming to children.

Howard Rheingold's (BTW fouding editor of Hotwired) book Tools for Thought is a really good ressource on this and is available online at rheingold.com. It tells about Babbage, Boole, Turing, Engelbart, Kay, Nelson and many more. It's a must read for everyone interested in our history.