My six year old is rocking out with MIT's Scratch. He's half way through this great book (we're doing this one next). It's really cool, because you can do real programming with a drag and drop interface; kids who can't type well can put together pretty complicated programs (youtube search "MIT Scratch tutorial" for examples). Below the fold is the first program that Thomas actually designed himself (warning, slow load time).
In any case, you can actually program just about any old-school video game you want as well as newer type games like tower defenses. The books I linked to are really great in providing examples. If you've got young kids, Joe Bob definitely says check it out.
I'd be interested in the inputs of any other parents reading this who are teaching (or have taught) their kids programming. I haven't checked out Alice yet or started messing around with Python, but will probably hit those in the next fewyears since there are a lot of "kids learn to program by making games" type books for them as well.
[*And I hereby exorcise the spirit of grumpypantsism that has characterized the discussion of my last few posts. I promise to get back to nattering on about the unsustainable dichotomy between intuition and concept soon.]
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