I think my 9yo had a good experience with the Art of Problem Solving introductory programming course
http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/School/courseinfo.php?course_id=cs:intro
, which used Python. The later problem sets involving object-oriented programming were too difficult for him, but he paid attention to the weekly lectures in the virtual classroom throughout the course. Now, about a year later, he is avidly programming in Python.
I had been under the impression that this class was particularly difficult. However, when I look now, there is both an intro class and an intermediate class - did they change things? I'm trying to figure out if the intro class would be do-able for my almost-11-year-old (who currently happens to be using the AoPS intro to algebra text). Or should we wait another year or so, considering the cost of the class? He is very interested in programming (heavily into Scratch) and Python seems like it would be the next step. Whether his interest is enough to motivate him to work very hard is an open question, though I might be willing to take the chance if he's willing to try it.
