Course...

Use Visual Basic.

C would be a good choice if you can explain arrays and pointers really well. I know for a long time, I had trouble with pointers. I can't imagine what kinds of troubles kids would have with them :D

I would agree. For that age group and that timeline Visual Basic would be the way to go. More importantly than any language though is that you provide them with a good foundation of general programming topics like scope, program flow, conditionals, etc. From there people can usually pick up any language with minimal effort.
Webby

Python might also be a good choice.

Depending on your background, Squeak may be a good language to teach. It's pretty easy to develop interesting programs right away, but the class arrangement is different from every C++ IDE I've ever used. Check out www.squeak.org.

For young kids who have never programmed before, I seriously advocate Pascal. You don't need to use pointers for the simple stuff (like in C where you have to explain "and then we have scanf, where we have to have a '&' here for complicated reasons I won't tell you right now..."). I advocate Pascal over BASIC, as that will give them a better sense of structure.

I would not use Delphi, as that can be confusing with Object Pascal all over the place. Try finding Turbo Pascal somewhere, or use freepascal or something like that.

Quote:

Original post by SiCrane Python might also be a good choice.

This guy is wise.

I would recommend a scripting language like python/php/perl. I would probably shy away from from perl though, as fun as it is to use, the syntax is cryptic at best and can start bad habits. Php is of immediate benefit to those that have websites. python is more useful is the general sense.

For my self I havn't even care to study java...

There have been a few threads on a similar subject kind of.
teaching programming
is one, though I know there is a better one somewhere that deals with teaching younger people. Unfortuntely, google is not being so friendly right now and I'm unable to locate that more relevant thread. Perhaps somebody has it bookmarked or the like?

My recomendation would be Pascal.

When I started to learn programming I came up with QBASIC - i was pretty fustrated at the beginning :) It is really simple but not much practical. Then I moved to Pascal and was pretty amased , all the programming was plain intuitial, no pointers madness like C :).

I _DO NOT_ think you should use any of {Assembly, C, C++, C#, Java, ...c-like languages...} because the whole course would be wasted on syntax and such without them being able to actually program anything.

I'd like to suggest Lisp, but realistically I think that for teaching that age group python along with some library for graphics would be best. I don't know the language, but I can almost always guess what python source is doing very quickly because of its very clear, concise syntax and I think those two attributes would be helpful to beginners.