I've been extorted into introducing the neighbor's daughter (and possibly her slightly younger brother) to programming concepts this summer. She will be entering sixth grade (middle school) in the fall. I'm aware of a few possibilities which have educational materials:
- Storytelling Alice (Windows only, I'm Mac).
- Scratch, built on top of Squeak by folks at MIT (I'm currently leaning towards this).
- Squeak itself.
- Hackety Hack, for Ruby. (Currently Windows only, and apparently on hiatus. Looks really neat though).
Any other recommendations? Where's "A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" when you need it?
Personally, I'm against insulting a child's intelligence with a toy meant to baby them. When I learned to program, I built practical things I could use. When I hit toy languages, I got very frustrated by their limitedness.