If he likes Legos, the Lego Mindstorms kits are awesome. You get to build projects and then program them to do things. I'm not sure how the kit is currently s

If he likes Legos, the Lego Mindstorms kits are awesome. You get to build projects and then program them to do things. I'm not sure how the kit is currently set up, but 10 years ago it shipped with a basic, graphical programming language. You snapped together programming blocks to create the logic. Would probably be perfect for a younger kid. When your kid outgrows the graphical language (I did after a while) people have ported Java and C to the Mindstorms too.