I'm surprised no one has mentioned hackety hack, it was a project designed around the super simple shoes gui framework by _why? specifically to make it easy/fun to get kids into programming and help people design engaging curriculum for teaching kids the basics of programming. Ruby is also a fairly practical language to learn first as it's used out in the world a lot but abstracts a lot of the nasty bits away from beginners.

It's probably at least worth taking a quick look at: http://hackety.com/

Paul Mooring

Operations Engineer

www.opscode.com

From: plug-discuss-bounces@lists.phxlinux.org <plug-discuss-bounces@lists.phxlinux.org> on behalf of AZ Pete <plug@cactusfamily.com>
Sent: Wednesday, July 10, 2013 6:12 PM
To: PLUG Discuss
Subject: Programming for Kids

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.

Any ideas would appreciated.
Thanks,
Peter