Hi Pete,

Jason - I second scratch as it's very common for that age range.

The following are kid-friendly versions of industry tools like LabView or Simulink. These tools adopt a paradigm of programming through drag-n-drop elements vs. text coding. The main difference (between text based coding and drag-n-drop coding) being that the engagement can be much higher with our young ones.
Best,
Vimal

On Wed, Jul 10, 2013 at 6:47 PM, Jason Holtzapple <ml@bitflip.net> wrote:
On 07/10/2013 06:12 PM, AZ Pete wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> While my two boys (ages 9 & 13) are at home for the summer I currently
> keep them active by giving them fun math and science projects.
>
> I had the idea to have them become more familiar with basic programming
> concepts and perhaps be able to write the proverbial"hello world" program.
> I believe that programming (of any kind) is a required, core competency
> skill required for any kind of work in the 21st century, whether that
> work is in the tech industry or not.
>
> Does anyone know of some resources for simple and fun programming
> projects for kids.  I don't particularly care about which language, but
> we are on Windows platform.

I'd try scratch.mit.edu or alice.org to start. For more advanced budding
programmers, robocode.sf.net or appinventor.mit.edu might be fun. There
are more, those are just ones that I have used or taught personally.
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