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Alice and StoryTelling Alice
"Alice is an innovative 3D programming environment that makes it easy to create an animation for telling a story, playing an interactive game, or a video to share on the web. Alice is a teaching tool for introductory computing. It uses 3D graphics and a drag-and-drop interface to facilitate a more engaging, less frustrating first programming experience."
Thank you Randy Pauch. We miss you.

Or try
Myro using Microsoft Robotics Studio

or Pyro which was the non-MS precursor to Myro... program bots in Python with either real bots or simulation.

Either way, the graphical environments and real bots give kids a great way to SEE and TOUCH their results, which is more how they learn. You can cover all the important software constructs (variables, loops, events, data structs, etc) and avoid some of the abstract conceptualization required in more conventional languages/applications. They will learn the concepts through doing & using them. Then once they are hooked, they can dig into other languages.

Works great for middle school & college kids.... Pyro's got years of track record teaching intro to AI - to liberal arts majors!

Most languages dont give much back quickly. You need something that will catch and hold their attention. 3D graphics and Robotics are cool to kids (and many of us geeks) and actually not that hard to break into. In fact both are used very effectively to introduce middle school and older students to programming - even high level stuff like AI (or autonomous behaviors). And the links below are Open Source!

Check out Alice.org

"Alice is an innovative 3D programming environment that makes it easy to create an animation for telling a story, playing an interactive game, or a video to share on the web. Alice is a teaching tool for introductory computing. It uses 3D graphics and a drag-and-drop interface to facilitate a more engaging, less frustrating first programming experience."

Or how about Robotics?
Myro and Institute for Robotics Education
or its pure python predecessor Pyro Robotics

Vex kits are expensive, but will teach your kids about everything. A cheaper option is just going to radio shack and buying a bit of everything (breadboard, LED, resistor kit, some wire). I'm at IGVC (Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition) and well that's what everyones robot mostly is anyway.

Seconding lego mindstorms, and get your kids into lego league-it's a great, fun experience for younger kids and a nice intro to robotics. I'd especially push that if you've got girls-get them into it early and get them comfortable around boys and a machine shop or they'll end up stuck with the pr and painting (maybe software if they're good) jobs even if they get into robotics.

Also, have them build their own box to run computer code-lego and microsoft are options to explore, pyro if you're dead set on FOSS. Once they've built it, they'll have a lot of fun testing it, plus they learn a lot of coding fundamentals.

This is already the third project called pyro.
"Python Remote Objects" http://pyro.sourceforge.net/
and "Python Robotics" http://pyrorobotics.org/
and possibly there are even more.

If people object to using MS-based robotics software, then let's find and/or build free alternatives. I know of one: Pyro, written in Python (which is itself free/OSS and easy to use). I haven't used it myself, but it seems to support both real robots and virtual hardware. What other systems exist?

How about building a simple I/O system ported to several languages, with a standard set of functions, suitable for commanding several brands of real robot as well as virtual models?

Somebody already mentioned Player/Stage; there is also Pyro, a framework for developing robotics code in Python. Pyro is open-source and geared toward educational purposes.

You can get started right now with real and simulated robots. Try PyroRobotics.org which allows you to write robot "brains" in Python code. You can control a simulated robot immediately, or build your own out of a Roomba, and use the same control system.

Also, check out blogs.RobotEducation.org for more information on other robots.

Note to self: when talking to the press, don't use complicated technical jargon, like "debugging" :)

I think what I actually said was "rather than debug a program to make it give the right answer, the students must debug the program to make the robot behave the way they want it to."

I think many of you will actually like the hardware, software, and curriculum that we are designing. Checkout http://www.roboteducation.org/ and http://pyrorobotics.org/ The new version of the software will be based on Pyro, Python Robotics. We think of the hardware as something like an ipod on wheels. The software is also being developed with an open source license. This project is not what many of you guess it might be.

The CS1 and CS2 that we are developing won't be watered down, but also won't be just the standard "intro to programming, using robots". It's a complete rethinking of the intro courses.

-Doug Blank

It's easy to write code for an AIBO... there's a number of open source software frameworks for this great hardware platform -- although of course my favorite would be my own: Tekkotsu

And it's all supported by Sony -- no hacking required!

There's a variety of levels you can code at as well -- there's several high-level scripting languages like URBI, R-Code, and even a couple upcoming Python interfaces, as well as a number of low-level C/C++ interfaces (e.g. Tekkotsu) which can run onboard and directly process every bit and byte, or remote control from your PC for maximum horsepower.