I personally think that Python fills the goal of instant validation quite well for children. There's an interactive interpreter and very little setup for your f

I personally think that Python fills the goal of instant validation quite well for children. There's an interactive interpreter and very little setup for your first program (as opposed to Java's public static void main(String[] args) before even reaching "Hello World"). I help run a summer school[1] for high school students (many of whom have never programmed) and within a few days they can start putting together fairly complicated programs. One for example created an anagram solver for an online game literally within a day of learning what a program was and two or three days later their team had created a simple web crawler as the basis of their from-scratch search engine. I think as long as they see a way to solve their own problems you'll hold attention long enough to get them self sufficient. [1] National Computer Science School - www.ncss.edu.au