A few people have asked me recently for what I'd recommend using to teach children computer science skills, and more specifically how to learn programming. These are also really good ways to get your skills up to scratch as an educator!
1: MIT Scratch - Not the first visual programming tool, but one of the best around now. Kids love it, it teaches the concepts of programming very well, but ultimately it is limited. So you could move onto...
2: Scratch BYOB - Berkley's offshoot of Scratch that allows you to access higher order functions and make scratch more like a modern OO Programming language. Better for older kids.
3: Alice - Alice and Storytelling Alice will take you onto an even higher level. This is a free (again) 3D programming environment that introduces learners to the more complex three dimensional design space and mimics production programming languages like C++ and Java. As Alice has been around a long time, lots of well-developed resources exist to help you out, and the visual, immediate nature of Alice helps keep learners engaged.
4: Python - "Learn to think like a computer scientist"! Python would appear at first as hardcore as any programming language. Certainly the way you create in it is just like the classic languages - you write your scripts in a text editor, and then run them to see the results. Except Python is really easy to work with and much more forgiving than C or its peers. The thing is, it hides massive power under the hood and you could create something as impressive as Facebook or eBay given the time and motivation. (4a would be Ruby on Rails, a great environment for creating Web apps, with the 'Rails' giving you structured support to do common Web stuff like logging in to a site without reinventing the wheel. Favoured by the RAD/Agile Web development industry)
.. to be continued (with some stuff to help teach the fundamentals)
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