Comment How to teach a 12-year old to program? (Score 1) 799
The real problem with teaching kids to program in to get a problem they want to solve.
You should try Alice. At SC08, I saw a room of 8-14 year-old kids doing Alice, and you could not tear them away from the computer. The original Alice was designed for middle-school girls, but Alice 2 has all the Sims characters, so kids can create a virtual world. And even better, the new Alice spits out a NetBeans project and Java code, so you can make the jump to "real" programming.
http://www.alice.org/