A friend of mine is thinking about getting his 10 year-old son started with a programming language. I recommended Scheme as a good functional language with decent references (e.g. "The Little Schemer." and "The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Languages" -- more for the "teacher" than the student in this case).
This friend has stumbled across MIT's open courseware (6.001)
Any comments from our esteemed colleagues, steeped in the art of computing pedagogy? More than anything, I'd like to convince my friend that combinatorics is the key to success with programming, but I think getting computers to do anything would be reward in itself for the curious 10 year-old.
Now, when is Nickle coming out with its own intro computing text, presumably Nickles and Dimes?