I agree. Lego Mindstorms, the old one or the new one. Lego has an educational program to make the kits easily available to schools. It's programming, but in a graphical, orderly way that prevents too many obvious mistakes. Advanced students can then go on to use the kit with Java or C, for which there is plenty of information available. Plus, you get to build a gadget that rolls around and picks up stuff.
Otherwise, I would recommend either some flavor of Logo or Smalltalk/Squeak, both of which were designed with education in mind.
On the third hand, many of us learned programming with a simple version of BASIC, like QBASIC, or even GW-BASIC. Microsoft now has available a free thing called Simple BASIC (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/devlabs/cc950524.aspx).
There's always AppleScript for the Mac fans, which is supposed to be like English... but isn't.
And APL was originally designed for teaching math. But you don't want to go there.
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I agree. Lego Mindstorms, the old one or the new one. Lego has an educational program to make the kits easily available to schools. It's programming, but in a graphical, orderly way that prevents too many obvious mistakes. Advanced students can then go on to use the kit with Java or C, for which there is plenty of information available. Plus, you get to build a gadget that rolls around and picks up stuff.
... but isn't.
Otherwise, I would recommend either some flavor of Logo or Smalltalk/Squeak, both of which were designed with education in mind.
On the third hand, many of us learned programming with a simple version of BASIC, like QBASIC, or even GW-BASIC. Microsoft now has available a free thing called Simple BASIC (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/devlabs/cc950524.aspx).
There's always AppleScript for the Mac fans, which is supposed to be like English
And APL was originally designed for teaching math. But you don't want to go there.