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I'd start with something like BASIC or maybe C# as a compromise initially. C is not a very forgiving language for newbies and there doesn't seem much demand for C/C++ coders these days anyway.
I don't think you'd be able to do much in C without pointers, how would you even deal with strings? Ok, character arrays I suppose but that's still effectively a pointer but with different syntax.
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Hi Amarnath,
Long ago (1983-1984) I created and ran a computer program at the French-English BiLingual School in San Francisco. We had (what else ?) Apple IIe's, Apple dot-matrix Printers. No network, of course. And, all floppy disks.
For nine months I had over two-hundred children per week from age 8 to 16 in and out of the classroom. I started them with Logo, and then I had a kind of "mutiny" by a group of older kids' parents who wanted them to learn Basic, so I threw in Basic. At the end of a year of this I was "burned out," and digusted with the school administration who broke their promise to me that the first year of the program would be for upper school students only (around seventy students total).
And of course there were some games that really did require advanced logic from the kids.
The younger children could really relate to "turtle graphics" in Logo, and the better of the lower school teachers came up with "turtle dances" which the kids could act out on the playground, then come in and make happen on the computers. Memory of these Apple machines (in Logo) was so puny that any attempt to model a "real-life" scenario : like the kids schedule for a week, would run out of memory.
Looking back on this experience, I wonder if I it might not have been much more useful to teach kids real world applications, like a SpreadSheet, a Database, a Word Processor. I wonder if the use of those applications (particularly a spreadsheet with a macro recorder and a macro language) may have more benefit, and certainly require some of the same cognitive skills that programming in a "toy" language like Logo requires.
Of course today's machines, with lots of ram and hard disk storage : well, it's a whole other world.
In my experience : only one in about ten of the younger children really benefited from the programming aspect, per se. But, among the older students were kids who were already into assembly language on the 6502.
One young fourteen year old wizard actually created a "vector font" in Logo which he was able to rotate (yes, he got an "A").
I haven't looked at the educational research on various forms of computer training on younger people in so many years, but I wonder what has, or has not, been found out. The educational research of the time period when I was on the "front lines" was often "cultic" and, imho, biased by the great desire of the researchers to see kids on computers. I went to a convention of computer teachers in schools : I thought I was at a religious rally for St. Seymour Papert, and Saints Jobs, and Wozniak !
I don't know if anything in this ramble is helpful to you, but I hope so. 
best, Bill
"Many : not conversant with mathematical studies, imagine that because it [the Analytical Engine] is to give results in numerical notation, its processes must consequently be arithmetical, numerical, rather than algebraical and analytical. This is an error. The engine can arrange and combine numerical quantities as if they were letters or any other general symbols; and it fact it might bring out its results in algebraical notation, were provisions made accordingly." Ada, Countess Lovelace, 1844
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Hi,
What children need are well designed problems for them to learn to program. They should increase in difficulty, etc. and be very visual.
I've checked out all the stuff on the thread so I hope this is informative. First- "Microworlds" (Logo), devleoped by MIT for children- has many features that are attractive for girls as well as boys. Can have robotics, but has a lot of very visual projects that introduce ideas of OOP. Then try ALICE, developed at Carnegie Mellon- very visual as well, introduction to OOP and I think uses Java. It is real java code,but uses an interface where you pull a correctly written template for a loop for instance. I don't know how old your children are, but most kids aren't ready to program much before 6th grade..(READING is good..Piaget etc-)
By way of background I have taught programming to bright and gifted children for many years- had a few eighth graders who even got themselves into C++ in the late 90's and selling shareware on the web.
As for the web- html is simple enough that a child could generate a "pick your own ending" story on a website easily and learn some fundamentals of links, images, CSS as you get more complicated. Then, with experience of Java or Java script you could start to make some interactive features..
liz
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Hi,
I tried several tools with my 10 years old son and what he found the best (yes, it should be them, not you ) is the Scratch (http://scratch.mit.edu/[^].
It's is very easy to get started and the programming uses a visual approach.
After a while, I could see my son can now understand perfectly the logic of all basic programming structures (loops, ifs, variables, etc).
Regards
Paulo
-------------
Paulo Garcia
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Checkout Scratch at MIT. http://scratch.mit.edu/
It is a more visual way of dragging and dropping code statements. It is centered around moving sprites arround on the screen. When they are done it will publish there project to the gallary at the Scratch site so they can share there creation with there friends.
I found it to incorporate many concepts in ways kids can understand, including xy courdinate and moving sprites, variables, control statements, collision detection, broadcasting/listenting for events.
I was able to teach my son concepts of mutlti threading and syncronization because each sprite gets its own script which is running concurrently. By using the event broadcasting and listenting I was able to show him how to sychronize actions between different sprites.
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if she sticks with it, you know she's truly interested.
Otherwise, get her into cheerleading 
David
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I started with C. I feel it is a good starting place for high level languages. You could even start them on C#. I'm not particularly fond of it, but i think it would make a reasonable starting place by reducing some of the learning curve.
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I faced the same problem about a year ago with my 12-year-old and 9-year-old. Programming with C was too daunting for them. Too much to learn before they could do anything useful. Look for a program called Scratch. It was developed by MIT to stimulate interest in programming in children. I am pretty critical of programming tools, but Scratch is an impressive achievement. It is also free. It allows kids to become familiar with variables, if-else, loops while doing it in a drag-and-drop format so that the kids don't get bogged down in syntax. I would highly recommend it. My kids did all sorts of animated movies and games. It has a lot of pre-packaged routines for animations and graphics, all of which are graphical. You can find it at http://scratch.mit.edu/
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Small Basic
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/devlabs/cc950524.aspx
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The answer is to make sure they can read, write, speak, and communicate correctly in English.
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Go ask Alice [^]. Let them be kids and have fun.
IMHO dragging them into programming languages is going to be like forcing them to learn a foreign language. They're going to hate it and fight it every step of the way.
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We teach a gaming camp that uses the XNA C# component with middle school age kids. They understand it and do really well. I would suggest going to creators.xna.com and trying some of the tutorials. They are very good. The best part is that our kids get to upload the games to their xbox and impress all their friends!
--Regina
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I would consider "SCRATCH". (http://info.scratch.mit.edu/About_Scratch)
Scratch is a new programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art -- and share your creations on the web.
Scratch is designed to help young people (ages 8 and up) develop 21st century learning skills. As they create and share Scratch projects, young people learn important mathematical and computational ideas, while also learning to think creatively, reason systematically, and work collaboratively.
Scratch is available free of charge...
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I downloaded Scratch and played with it. Wonderful!! A pity that we did'nt have such a thing when we were kids. A real tool to sparkle the creativity of kids. Thank you, MIT, for developing it and offering it for free. Thanks to all the contributors for this thread, for all the suggestions.
- Amarnath
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I looked through the thread and did not see any reference to the Alice project. This is a free download and is designed to be a first introduction to object oriented programming. It has a nice GUI and you can relatively quickly get your kids writing their first app. check it out at http://www.alice.org.
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Alice.org teaches OO Programming by letting you manipulate a 3D world. They are sponges and will absorb and intuitively grasp the concept of inheritance and object properties.
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I started by scripting for several interesting games. There's a german game called Clonk, which has a C-like scripting language
(www.clonk.de). The obvious advantage is, that it is more motivating, because of instantly visible effects of your work. But that probably only worked for me because I'm weird...
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I started out programming as a kid  I'd recommend batch files and possibly VB.NET.
_____________________________
Don't download it, make it.
Visual Basic /C#
modified 13-Feb-19 21:02pm.
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Where do the folks that know enough about both of these hang out? I want to sub-divide my current blog site to present a primary business and technical site as a 'root', with blog(s) as 'child' folders, using WordPress if possible, without sacrificing ASP.NET functionality.
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have you tried it?
sounds like it should be pretty straightforward to do.
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I ne\d teh codez. 
Seriously, no, I haven't, but was just hoping to catch a freebie heads up if anything terrible awaits me. Going to try it now at home - after getting PHP running on Vista 
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They work fine side by side. My web hosting account setup is IIS7/.net + PHP. Love it. Word of warning, I had one hell of a time getting PHP running on my Vista + IIS7 laptop (not obvious permissions things, may have just been me breaking it though).
// Steve McLenithan
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