Recommendations for children interested in programming

[Diver]

Another vote for Mindstorms. It combines Lego technics model building with sophisticated plug and play hardware and an easy to learn NXT-G programming language with the option to move onto other languages if you like.

The programming language is drag and drop with blocks, the basic stuff is pretty easy with loops and conditional statements but you can create subroutines and do a lot of advanced stuff too. Build a machine and then spend hours programming it to do clever stuff and making hardware mods. It helps the kids learn logic, process flow as well as mechanical engineering and design. Have a look at this demo of the programming language or the Mindstorms website. Once you grow out of NXT-G, you can use any of a number of other programming languages to do more complex stuff till your heart's content.

My son and I have a lot of fun with Mindstorms and it's a great thing to do together, learning the fundamentals.

Brilliant!
I wish I had the time to play with this myself

[doodab]

I should have added: Of those here who learned to program as a child, who didn't learn using BASIC?

+1 for me.

And on the speccy at least hand rolling some assembly, using POKE to load bytes into memory and then using USR to execute the code was pretty close to the machine. The original spectrum manual was a great book.