[ElliotH]

I personally think that the best computer related education you can give a child of that age is to get them to understand that in almost all cases it is safe to 'fiddle' with the software on computers. I think I owe a almost all my knowledge of computers today to my parents who allowed me to repeatedly break the software running on the family PC from DOS to early Windows until I finally got my own.

Almost everyone I know of my age who can program with any level of competancy are the people who were given 'free reign' over a computer fairly early in life. Whereas the people who are less skilled are the people who were always told that if they touched the wrong thing they'd break it.