I'm one of those 'gifted' students, and when I was in 4th grade, (I was 9 at the time) a friend and I read HTML For Dummies. It was a lot of fun, quite simple, and has been very rewarding ever since. The coolest part was when I could show off to kids at school by having IE display "Joel is the coolest kid ever!" It made me famous in school, and kids still come to me with computer questions, despite the fact that I haven't taken any of the available computer classes.
HTML For Dummies taught me to code in notepad and then save as.htm. That's what I still do primarily today, but I'm moving on to Dreamweaver. I would not suggest using Frontpage or any other WYSIWYG tool, it detracts from learning the actual code. The only bad part about the entire experience that I can remember is the occasional frustration when the machine couldn't correct for my syntax errors, and I'm sure Dreamweaver could help with that a lot.
It's been 7 years now, and only in the past few weeks have I rediscovered an appetite for learning code. (It's my own fault that I lost interest, nothing in HTML was ever boring.) Since 4th grade, I've only applied my knowledge of HTML perhaps a few times per year, but I've been quite surprised with my high retention. I've never learned any of the other languages, (although I now plan to learn C and PHP) so I certainly can't speak for them, but HTML was one of the funnest things I have ever done and I highly recommend it to kids.
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I'm one of those 'gifted' students, and when I was in 4th grade, (I was 9 at the time) a friend and I read HTML For Dummies. It was a lot of fun, quite simple, and has been very rewarding ever since. The coolest part was when I could show off to kids at school by having IE display "Joel is the coolest kid ever!" It made me famous in school, and kids still come to me with computer questions, despite the fact that I haven't taken any of the available computer classes. HTML For Dummies taught me to code in notepad and then save as .htm. That's what I still do primarily today, but I'm moving on to Dreamweaver. I would not suggest using Frontpage or any other WYSIWYG tool, it detracts from learning the actual code. The only bad part about the entire experience that I can remember is the occasional frustration when the machine couldn't correct for my syntax errors, and I'm sure Dreamweaver could help with that a lot.
It's been 7 years now, and only in the past few weeks have I rediscovered an appetite for learning code. (It's my own fault that I lost interest, nothing in HTML was ever boring.) Since 4th grade, I've only applied my knowledge of HTML perhaps a few times per year, but I've been quite surprised with my high retention. I've never learned any of the other languages, (although I now plan to learn C and PHP) so I certainly can't speak for them, but HTML was one of the funnest things I have ever done and I highly recommend it to kids.