Codecademy http://www.codecademy.com is a free site for learning to program in JavaScript. You do the programming exercises online -- there is nothing to download. My 8yo likes it. Forbes has an article
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jjcolao/2012/03/22/codecademy/ about it.

ETA: An article mentioning Codecademy and other sites is
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/28/t...net-computer-code-gains-a-following.html
Even Non-Techies Aim to Learn the Internet’s Language
by JENNA WORTHAM
New York Times
March 27, 2012

Last edited by Bostonian; 03/27/12 12:48 PM. Reason: added NYT article