Your age is showing. There's almost no such thing anymore as an IBM PC. smirk

DD9 was invited to join her school's robotics team, which is basically a programming course. They are given the robot, and they program it to perform real-world tasks, or "missions."

I couldn't possibly come up with a better way to introduce kids to programming. It's competitive, it's goal-oriented, and it relates programming to real-world problem solving.