I really enjoyed solving the "Towers of Hanoi" problem, with recursive functions (7 disks on one of three pegs; move them to another peg without stacking a large disk on top of a small one). I learned this in a high school Pascal class, but I really disliked Pascal (still do) because you had to define/declare every little detail. I think children would get and stay interested if you started with something like Alice. Or, if you want to avoid installing software (or if you're running older/slower machines), you could teach the basics with Java script or VB script, both of which run natively under Windows. On the other hand, if you're going to teach programming, you should be an experienced programmer yourself, in which case you probably wouldn't be asking what language to use.
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I really enjoyed solving the "Towers of Hanoi" problem, with recursive functions (7 disks on one of three pegs; move them to another peg without stacking a large disk on top of a small one). I learned this in a high school Pascal class, but I really disliked Pascal (still do) because you had to define/declare every little detail. I think children would get and stay interested if you started with something like Alice. Or, if you want to avoid installing software (or if you're running older/slower machines), you could teach the basics with Java script or VB script, both of which run natively under Windows. On the other hand, if you're going to teach programming, you should be an experienced programmer yourself, in which case you probably wouldn't be asking what language to use.