Comment Python or LOGO (Score 1) 962
Personally, my first introduction (at 8) was LOGO, and it was tons of fun, but I didn't make the connection between it and programming until much after I had started to do what I thought was programming (which I started in C). It also might be even too juvenile for 11-14 year olds, if they are sufficiently mature.
I'd suggest Python as a first 'real' programming language. Besides the fact that it has blindingly simple syntax that is often a few characters away from the pseudocode you might explain the program in, at a higher level, it allows for simple iterative programming, procedural programming, functional programming, and object-oriented programming, so students can progress from one level of intellectualism to the next without learning new syntax, and with the interactive shell, demos and exploration are made that much easier.
There's also something called PyLogo, which, though I've never tried it, looks promising:
