[guylhem]

As a kid in France (in the late eighties, quite young, but I can't remember when precisely), I had some "programming classes", using Logo on Thomson computers - http://www.oocities.org/siliconvalley/9723/thomson.html

Basically, all primary schools had some of them in a special room, and kids would get to do stuff on them, by pairs of 2 or 3 - part of the time was guided interaction, then you would "experiment" which what you'd learnt this day.

I can't say how effective it was, because it was not really integrated with the rest of the curriculum (government program gone wild!) but the interesting thing was that it allowed experimenting.

Before that, I read computer journals, wrote programs on paper, and "ran" them in my head. There I had a machine to do that and could spot differences between my intent and the action - ie where there were differences in the interpretation, ie BUGS!!!

What I remember most fondly about Logo, is how it allowed recursion and the very visual nature (lines, color, circles...). The programs were simple but allowed us kids to play with the concept of recursion.