If you've never tried out scratch before it is really fun. I've been making games with my 11 and 14 year old brother this year; they've gotten excited about programming because you get really immediate results. The code looks like multicolored nested C-clamps which you pull off a menu from the side; no typing required. So far we've made whack-a-mole, an asteroid space shooter, and some other random half projects.

Now if they made a scratch to AS3 compiler that would really be something; the games do run as java applets but I think they would be a lot more excited if they saw their game on Kongregate.

Bah! Fie on these fancy toys. I learned to program at aged nine using Pascal. My first serious program was an addition driller which I then used.

Seriously, I moved into Mindstorms later when I was in middle school and was really disappointed by the limitedness of the blocks 'language.'

Keep these kids far away from the Joel on Software crowd, they'd have these kids doing nothing but creating UML diagrams, doing "OO design" that isn't really OO, and writing stored procedures for SQL Server, in the name of like, being "pragmatic" or some bullshit.

I'm a big fan of Alice. Apparently there is a version targeting younger kids - Storytelling Alice (http://www.alice.org/kelleher/storytelling/index.html)

_why's Hackety Hack is a good introduction for kids that involves doing real things like pulling information off of web pages and making blogs.

http://hacketyhack.net/