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I started with QBASIC, and I would rather recommend against that. Things like real functions (as opposed to GOSUB) and such, even though you can do them in QBASIC, I didn't see for years.

DO NOT, I repeat DO NOT do what many comp sci departments and high schools do, and that is "begin with Visual Basic".

NO! NO NO NO NO NO! Okay, so they learn about variables and shit, but, just, NO. Terrible programming practices and weird little things where commenting is done with apostrophes and other typical retarded shit is what you'll end up teaching them.

Visual Basic is OK for a quick and dirty Windows program. But if you want to teach the basics of what "real" programming is, I wouldn't recommend VB.

Consider something like POV-Ray [povray.org], since it's a programming environment with a visual payoff.

Show someone a simple program that generates 10 randomly positioned mirrored sphere over a checkered landscape then encourage them to play with the number of sphere, assign colors to them, etc.

Much more interesting to be able to *see* the output of your program than just reading "Hello World!".

G.

11-14 years old = NO CASH.

Nobody has more free resources available to the budding programmer than Microsoft; like it or not.

Anyone can download FREE IDEs, free Source code, videos, documentation up the wazoo.

Also, C# is almost syntactically identical to Java, and it is a good language for the beginner to discover whether or not they have a REAL interest and a knack for coding.

If I were 14 again, wanting to learn how to code, Microsoft would be nirvana with all the free available stuff out there. There really is no contest.

As always, I got karma to burn, so take your best shot....

If you're trying to introduce the concepts of looping, iterations, etc and don't want to get hung up on the details of the language, I highly recommend the Lego Mindstorm kits. They have a flow-chart programming interface that I had great success introducing programming to my 11-13 year old cousins, and if I remember correctly, they also have a lower level interface to let you start writing your own functions.

For kids this age, nothing is better/cooler at showing them the basics of programming than something that gives a physical response. Loops, conditions, make so much more sense when trying to figure out how to keep your robot from running off the edge of the table.

Tangible real-world feedback, and a sense of real accomplishment. If you just give them abstract languagues for the sake of language, they get disappointed they can't just whip up the next Madden game. Besides, they probably all already have Legos at home, and a Mindstorm kit is something they can easily get at home, which probably won't happen with Pascal compilers or Basic editors.

I know several young people who've got hooked on programming because of this free book: http://www.briggs.net.nz/log/writing/snake-wrangling-for-kids/ [briggs.net.nz]

There are versions of the book for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Although the book targets kids as young as 8, it would still be able to speak to an 11 or 12 year old I think.

I recommend PostScript.

For kids, PostScript has the advantage of nearly instant gratification, because it allows them to draw graphics quickly. It has loops and conditionals. It uses stacks and variables and functions.

All you need to get going in PostScript is a text editor and a PostScript to PDF converter. On a Mac, it's built in. On Windows, I use GhostScript in CygWin and run ps2pdf, just like I would on Linux. Alternatively, Acrobat Distiller should do the trick.

If these children really are the gifted ones you say, they'll already have the basic concepts of an editor: create, change, save, so they can start creating programs much sooner.

You also want them to become familiar with the basic syntax od computer languages - most of which are quite similar and look a lot like Perl's syntax.

Perl also gives those who wish, the ability to develop further, after the classes finish.The large amount of freely available documentation and examples on the internet will help then learn from properly written code from other people.

I hate to say this since I don't even know the language (heck I'm barely competent with HTML) and came up through GW-BASIC, Turbo Pascal, assembly, FORTRAN, C, Tcl, C++, Perl, and some others I'm sure I'm overlooking, but...

JavaScript

First, it's nominally C-like, so it gives them exposure that will help them with a large variety of other languages (e.g. C, Pascal, C++, Java).

Second, it's available to be used pretty much anywhere the kids have access to a computer. At home. At school. At a friends house where they can show off their newfound coolness. Don't underestimate this, because it's very important that they have access to the necessary programming tools in their idle time at home and elsewhere. It's also important because they don't need to learn how to use a compiler, linker, and all those other tool distractions that will get in the way of understanding programming itself.

Finally, it's useful in a context they likely already somewhat understand -- web pages. Fibonacci sequences and prime number sieves and such are all wonderful, but an environment that allows them to build something a bit more interactive and, lets face it, relevant to their day-to-day life, will inspire some portion of them to continue the pursuit. Granted, I got a lot of personal satisfaction out of writing BASIC programs to print "x" characters in a sine wave scrolling up the screen, but somehow I think the bar has been raised for today's kids' expectations of what a computer can do.

I (and others) wrote a good wikipedia page on this topic
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_programming_language [wikipedia.org] . I'd look at this list

I personally love and can recommend Alice http://www.alice.org/ [alice.org] and had a great deal of success with my daughter with this.

If only for the graphics control. It lets you draw text anywhere on the screen, and clear it, enabling quite sophisticated graphics and animations. It can also wait for user input and respond, so you can make games with it. Kids love that sort of thing.

Logo has good graphics control but poor input-response, and Python is a much better language than both Logo and QBasic, but since it can't (easily) do graphics, it appears quite boring.

Actually, I started my son off with Visual Basic at age 12. It wasn't very difficult and it may well be better to start them off with event driven programing rather than procedural. Rather than writing the answer on a command text line, put the results in a text box. Push buttons to actually execute code. The kids will really like writing a program that looks more like what they are used to than some antiquated program written for use on DecWriters. My son loved it and now at 24 he is a programming project leader for a software development company.

I always wonder why colleges start out teaching Java first. Procedure based languages are easier. You learn
2 + 2 = 4
before you learn
a^2 + b^2 = c^2.

You can learn the basics in any language. The syntax is all very similar. Lets look at the difference.
in C explain a routine.
int main(int argc, char *argv[]){
    return 0;
}
In java explain a class and a routine. Plus the string class is more complicated than a char * and an int.

class javaprog
{
                public static void main(String args[])
                {
                }

}

Always start with the fundamentals.
You should know what pointers are and what memory is before you learn what a class is.

A programmer needs to know why if he allocates 2 million empty string classes why his memory gets chewed up. To a C programmer the answer is obvious.
Fundamentals! Fundamentals! Fundamentals!

The problem with most introductory programming courses is that they drop you in the deep end and expect the student to eventually figure out how to stay alive based on all the tools they start throwing at you. And I'll be honest, I don't have an answer as to what programming language you should use or if it even matters. Let me explain.

I first started learning programming at the age of 14 (first year in high school). So I might have been one of these kids. Prior to that I knew how to write html and make webpages. That part was easy because there is no programming there. But when I got to my introductory programming course taught in C/C++ at the time, I didn't feel equipped as a student to tackle the problems presented. For example one of the tougher problems in the course was printing a diamond (ascii art) of stars based on a given number as input. So if they provided you with an input of 5, that meant at the widest point, the diamond would be 5 consecutive * characters with the previous and next lines being 3 consecutive * characters followed padded by one space on each end, and finally the top and bottom lines having one * with 2 spaces padding the left and right sides. Keep in mind that by this point, as a student, the most I had learned was basic algebra and perhaps a bit of geometry. The real heavy math/science courses were to be taught later in high school involving trigonometry, calculus, and physics.

Continuing on with the story, most students in the introductory programming class failed at this simple task of printing a diamond to the screen. It wasn't because of their lack of knowledge regarding programming, but their lack of knowledge regarding problem solving skills and the application of math. Had the teacher reviewed the problem at hand, by examining the necessary parts (calculations involved) on a black or whiteboard, I think all students could have implemented a solution. But the place where students were struggling was finding A solution. They would start writing 'for' loops knowing that this was a test of how well you understood 'for' loops without having a clue of why they needed the loops or what the loops were going to do.

So if you want your students to succeed, the language of choice will be the least of your problems since you are not bothering to teach high level programming paradigms (OO, functional, logic etc). The bigger problem will be how to teach the students to apply what they already know in a fashion they've never seen.

FOR $DIETY sake, don't do it!!! You'll end up surfing Slashdot ALL DAY like the rest of us.

If you're really bright, go into Physics or Chemistry! Better chance at girls than living in your mom's basement for the next 30 years till you're too old to program any longer!

Whatever you do, never ever ever teach someone BASIC. Not QBASIC and not any other flavour. It was my first programming language, too, and it took almost ten years and a study of computer science to finally get all those bad habits you acquire in BASIC out of my system. DO NOT POISON INNOCENTS WITH BASIC.

You can consider Pascal, which after all was designed specifically as a teaching language. There's also Oberon if you want to go more into OO and make sure that the language they learn on will never be used in an actual real-world context. :-)

Java, Mono, C++, etc will probably all be suggested, but I wouldn't consider them suitable for beginners.

I was just looking into this recently for my nephew. Scratch [mit.edu] looks really cool. I downloaded it and played for a few minutes and e-mailed my sister to tell her to install it for her kid. She hasn't done it yet, so I don't know if it was as good of an idea as I thought, but it sure looks cool.

It has color coded, drag and drop logic stuff that interlock like a puzzle so that kids can see how it fits together. It takes seconds to get a little animated sprite "walking" and do the fancy, whiz bang, pretty stuff today's kids will be wanting to see right away.