[vinalia]

It might be fun to look at LOGO (maybe UCBLogo[1], free books included) for a first programming language. This has a first-person (turtle) view on a GUI that you move around to make shapes and do math/physics. The idea is that when programming it will be easier for the programmer to associate themselves with the turtle and interaction/exploration in the language will be natural.

The Logo way is pretty different from conventional programming models because it was tailored to be more intuitive than conventional languages like C, JavaScript, or VB. It still offers access to complex, higher order programming concepts like algorithms, AI, automata, etc. Harold Abelson from MIT (SICP) wrote a cool book that covers math/physics in Logo, too.[2]

The creator of the language has an awesome book[3] on how computers can enhance pedagogy and someone wrote a cool blog post on programming for children that mentioned it too[4].

[1] http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~bh/logo.html

[2] http://www.amazon.com/Turtle-Geometry-Mathematics-Artificial...

[3] http://www.amazon.com/Mindstorms-Children-Computers-Powerful...

[4] http://worrydream.com/LearnableProgramming/