I think of this as a two sided issue. One is teaching the ideas of programming, that is variables, loops, conditionals, functions, objects etc.
And the other is focusing on teaching a programming language proper.

As an aside, I still consider Logo to be the perfect marriage of the two, where you could either muck around with the "turtle", or actually create fun stuff while utilizing the tools of programming. But seeing as this is not cool enough for today's audience, I refer mostly to two tools:

One is "programming games". Not in the redcode sense, but stuff like Human Resource Machine which revolves around solving puzzle using said programming tools.

The other is JavaScript. It's ubiquitous, and you can get the results of your changes visible immediately, like the way we used BASIC in the olden days. In fact, nowadays every browser comes with a Javascript REPL of its own, and once the student gets more acquainted with the language, code examples are legion, and are handy, unlike the usual "I learned Ruby/Perl/Python, now what do I do with it (other than looking at projects that have 50,000 LoC and do crazy magic)?".

Principle of Least Astonishment: Any language that doesn’t occasionally surprise the novice will pay for it by continually surprising the expert

In reply to Re: OT: Programming For Kids by Erez
in thread OT: Programming For Kids by karlgoethebier

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.