<p>I'll see if I can get Mathson to respond. He got interested in programming at a very young age when his Dad spent a Christmas vacation putting together something that would work as a lab notebook for him. It involved using Visual Basic. The first program I remember him writing was one that had a rocket go around the moon. It was incredibly crude, but cute. In fifth grade gifted class they had a project where everyone was asked to teach something simple to the rest of the class in about 15 minutes. I was there to observe and from what I saw most elementary school kids, even bright ones, are really ready for the abstract thinking that simple programming requires. (Not that my son was a great teacher, but still, the kids seemed so dense!) So I'd start with things like flash and dreamweaver that are very intuitive and give a lot of bang for the buck. Visual Basic (the old version anyway) is probably easier than C++ for beginners. AP Comp Sci now uses Java, which my son also thinks is easier than C++. One early cool project my son worked on was a version of the old "Adventure" or "Zork" game. You basically go through a maze and can give limited commands to pick up objects and move in various directions. He wrote his own version in 3rd grade after reading a book with a sample program. Basically it was a simple version of the Collosal Cave Adventure game which I played on the Arpanet way back in the 1970s. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventure_game%5B/url%5D">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventure_game</a> This article has links to source code: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossal_Cave_Adventure%5B/url%5D">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossal_Cave_Adventure</a></p>
<p>We were very frustrated when he was your son's age and there was nothing out there except a few limited summer programs geared to his interests.</p>