The big upside with starting with web pages is it is SUPER easy for the kids to show off their work. All kids are motivated differently, but for my son at least being able to get encouragement from friends at school and family members was a big motivation.

But good luck with Robomind and if that doesn't click, try something else (took my son like four different languages until he started to find some that really worked for him)

The web stack is only messy once you get beyond the basics and want to make it cross browser. As a teaching tool it doesn't need to have a modern design, look the same to everyone and work in IE6.

I had similar thoughts to jbattle. Giving kids the ability to do something, put it online, and make it instantly accesible to their friends and the world is huge. It also helps open their mind to how accesible their creations can be.

That said, Robomind does look pretty cool. I'm sure I would have enjoyed it when I was a kid.

You and jbattle do have a point that web stack is more accessible and easier to share the results. After playing with Robomind (a Java GUI app) last night, I did wish it were a web app.

The programming environment on my C=64 was messy, too. But kids are pretty smart, and they can be especially determined when they see they can make a real computer program.

That's a reason I like Javascript. It's not the best language, but you can write something that looks just like any real webpage.

As a kid I never liked software that was kind of like a game with a little programming environment inside: they weren't good games, and they weren't good programming environments.

I honestly think the differences between any starting tech is negligible. The only thing that matters is the child learns that she has the power to create (or figure out how to create) things that she wants that did not exist before she created them.

I've always thought that you'd have to worry about "technical elitists" dismissing HTML/JavaScript as "not programming", since that's what I experienced when I was growing up.

On the other hand, Khan Academy CS chose JavaScript because it made it easy to share the results with others. So... nowadays I wonder.

Haters are going to hate. It doesn't matter what field/discipline you're in. JavaScript is as much a proper programming language as Python or Ruby or Lua. They're all high level scripting languages that do roughly the same things. Only one of them is natively in every browser (JavaScript). JavaScript turns out to be fairly forgiving (you can intentionally or unintentionally leave out semicolons and it will generally still run as intended).

I wouldn't worry about "technical elitists". It's really the Dunning-Kruger effect at play more than anything. The less someone knows, the more they think they know, and the more likely they are to be outspoken about people they think are "below" them. There's also a fair amount of disdain between people in different programming paradigms (OO vs Functional, Low-level vs High-level languages, etc). NONE of that matters though. Build cool stuff and keep getting better. Let the "technical elitists" spend all their time worrying about what is or is not proper programming while you get on with your life, build cool stuff and continue to get better.

It's a lot different these days where so much is on the web and undeniably Javascript-driven. While there are always going to be purists who refuse to recognize Javascript as anything more than a dinky toy, their opinions aren't exactly relevant or prevalent anymore.

I suspect Khan Academies decision was more motivated by implantation details. It is far easier to right an interperater when you can ask the browser to interpetat for you.

I first learned to program back in the '90s with Adventure Simulator and World Builder, which made old-school adventure games.

Adventure Simulator was buggy as crap and would crash pretty regularly with about a 33% chance of corrupting your data when it did so, but I still learned a lot from it.

World Builder was much more solid, but I think most programmers would still consider it fairly awkward. A lot of things (non-static maps, even basic animation) required some weird hacks, and it had a bunch of separate bins that your code went into that all interacted but which you couldn't view at the same time.

Despite the fact that modern programmers (and probably most "real" programmers of the time) would view both of these tools as difficult and limiting, I still thought it was a great, fun way to learn that kept me motivated.

I started, alone, with a C64. Oh, and I didn't read English. I could only read the code in the manuals and type it in to see how it worked. Trust me, HTML/JS is ten times easier than that. My take is that language is not as important as having a mentor. I did not have a mentor, and that made me waste a lot of time with the basics.

Its so great that you are involving your son with robotics. Really awesome. You should definitely keep working on that. In fact, keep me updated on how you guys progress along. My email is in my profile.