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While your saving the world idea sounds exciting, it won't appeal to a large segment of your audience. Give them a choice of some other options, maybe something more social.

Perhaps - before you even attempt that:-

• Provide licensing information on your website
• Fix some "basic" problems
• mention that it is Apple BASIC
• differentiate it from BASIC4GL
• It is /. - tell us about the code and who wrote it.

Fix those point and you'll have a product that stands head and shoulders against the competition. Which isn't hard - most of the edutainment market is utter crap (I work with a large number of schools that buy utter shit on the basis of "social-networking" merit points)
Until then it 'seems' like you (Melody and Anne?) are just spamming Slashdot to promote a 2 month old project.

Not that the idea isn't without merit - it's just that the "edutainment" market is overcrowded with "outsourced" get-rich-quick, all-froth-(and social marketing) and-no-beer closed-source schemes knocked-up-in-an-afternoon that leave a trail of broken promises in schools already hard pressed to do the bare minimum with their tiny budgets

Good luck

"It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration" ~ Edsger W. Dijkstra

Taking apart a computer and programming are two orthogonal skills -- someone might be great at one and terrible at the other.

I've successfully used Basic4GL to teach basic programming, graphics, and algebra concepts to underperforming 6th graders. They really loved the exercise of drawing a spaceship first on graph paper and then on the computer using simple graphics commands. Basic4GL is great because it has built in sound, graphics, etc.

I will suggest 3 other things

1) Teach the Processing computer language. It's graphical, easy to start with, and mature.
2) Teach the Arduino. Build a simple circuit or a very simple robot with two servos. Any Arduino workshop devolves pleasantly into students tinkering with stuff.
3) Teach Python

I'll caution against Python because the text only interaction may bore them (even though I've taught this language before).

I did the same thing for a group of middle school students back in 2005 and after evaluating a bunch of graphics and sound libraries, we settled on Basic4GL.

Basic4GL is everything BASIC was, except without line numbers and with all the GLUT functionality built in (minus the initialization cruft). It also supports sound, loading a bunch of texture formats, and has the NEHE tutorials ported to it, and runs on VERY low end hardware. Download and run the demos -- you'll be impressed.

The kids did exceptionally well. We got a classroom full of (failing) middle school students to understand the idea of a coordinate system, and use this to design their own spaceship (using only a piece of graph paper and their own derived x,y coordinate pairs). We then guided them through animating this spaceship with key press events (and in the process they learned about coordinate transformations).

Our goal of having them design their own textures and sound effects never quite panned out, since we ran out of time -- but our ultimate goal was a classroom produced game where every student had a piece of the production workflow.

Afterwards, I found myself using Basic4GL for OpenGL prototyping since it does away with so much of the initialization, etc.

For example, the following is a whole Basic4GL program to draw a triangle

glBegin(GL_TRIANGLES)
        glVertex3f(0, 10, -30)
        glVertex3f(8, -4, -30)
        glVertex3f(-8, -4, -30)
        glEnd()
SwapBuffers()

This was, of course, several years ago. You may find something better now (I'd recommend looking into Processing. I'd stay away from anything that a kid can't set up on his own (i.e., combination of multiple libraries)).

For the classes, you want to emphasize the basics while at the same time giving them something they can sink their teeth into from Day 1. I started with having them type in a very simple program in the first class and then run it themselves. I went from there to what the coordinates mean, etc. You will find that some kids are faster than others, and some of them might surprise you. You will also find that they'll do really well teaching each other.

Good luck!

You might want to look at http://www.basic4gl.net/ , written by a Colleague of mine at my last job, looked like it would be a fun way of starting to program, without having to worry about functions, and objects etc.

Two co-workers and I asked ourselves the same question during a late-night troll-session about education two years ago...

That troll-session degenerated into a meaningful volunteer opportunity at a local after-school program for struggling high-school students.

One of our greatest successes has been the creation of a computer club. We basically scrounged some machines together and taught the kids graphics/game programming (this almost generated more interest than the organization could handle).

The easiest tool we found for this is Basic4GL, a freely available, GL compliant flavor of BASIC that runs on practically anything with Windows on it. Additionally, it has support for sound and comes with some pretty impressive (yet simple) examples and tutorials.

We took the following approach:

1) Started each lesson out with a demo of something cool & graphical, talked about concepts.

2) Showed the finished product of the lesson (e.g, draw a triangle, play a sound, create a simple asteroid game, etc).

3) Walked everyone step-by-step through the creation of the program for the lesson

4) Gave students time to work

5) Went around and made sure everyone was able to complete the assignment.

Some students struggled with concepts like loops. Others took off and ran with it, creating stuff that even impressed us. Ultimately, even the struggling 6th graders were programming and understanding what they were doing, even if they did not get too far.

[To quell the inevitable questions of "why not Linux" and "why not C, Java, etc." 1) BASIC is very easy to write "hello world" in. 2) Basic4GL required no environmental setup. 3) Basic4GL was very easy to give to students to run on their parents' otherwise pristine machines.]

(It'll get its own 3D engine next year, too. See Blitz 3D for evidence that this isn't some silly fantasy!)