What is the best way to teach kids programming?

A company in Iceland, called Skema, is currently offering programming courses for children from age 7. (Just for the record I don't work for them) They're using Alice (http://alice.org/) for this purpose and from what I've heard it's working very well. I personally bought a Lego Mindstorm kit for my son (and myself). That also works well to introduce things like conditionals, loops and counters and other basic execution flow as well as the concept of events and event handling.

Definitely Scratch (https://scratch.mit.edu/) as a good start, especially if the kids are on the younger side (say 10 or under).  I taught a course at the local school using Scratch and it worked well because the keen ones could go quite advanced and the less-keen could still do interesting things just with the drawing tools.Minecraft mods for the very keen, LearnToMod (http://learntomod.com/) is a not-bad subscription service which takes them through it step by step.  I signed my son (12 at the time) for this when it was in Beta and he worked his way through all the examples and enjoyed that; although after that he hasn't gone back to it I'll admit.But there's lots of other options, e.g. Kodu, SmallBasic etc; one problem is that they do appear and there's lots of excitement but then most fade away after a time.  I found this site on teaching kids to program has quite a good list http://www.teachkidstoprogram.com/.Personally I wouldn't start too young (under 8) unless they are really pestering you to do it, get them outside in the garden instead!

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I guess it depends on what age you mean when you say "kids". If very young, there are some good packages mentioned in the other answers. But if the child is at least 10, I would skip Logo and Scratch start them on Ruby. My daughter started learning it at about that age. It's a very intuitive language. There's a good Learn to Program primer that uses Ruby, for the very beginners. Then actually build a program with them. My daughter designed and write her own dungeons and dragons text-based game - I think she was 11. You can easily scale up to more complex programs from there.

Raspberry pi was created for teaching children computer skills. link: http://www.raspberrypi.org/about Here you can get the educational manual: http://pi.cs.man.ac.uk/download/Raspberry_Pi_Education_Manual.pdf

Let her start with typing a readable algorithm. Like if she wants to know how a computer do the sum of 2 numbers. Just tell her to think first how it would be. The answer should be like this: Get the first number; Get the second number; make the sum; see the result; Now, let her do several algorithm each day, and step by step, teach her how computer wants to read it.Like: Computer would get the first value like var x = 1; Then reads another one like var y = 3; ... At the end she will understand a specific syntax of a language, and it would start to advance in learning. I think if you keep it that way, in 2 years, she will create her own web applications or desktop application, and in 10 years, I think she would be sitting in the front line of the greatest programmers on earth.Good Luck.

If you are in Bay Area, ask them to join free CoderBunnyz workshops. CoderBunnyz is a board game that teaches coding concepts to young kids age 4-11. The game is invented by a 2nd grader 8 year old girl. The young girl has played this game with over 500 kids across bay area, through her workshops. Covered by NBC. More at http://www.coderbunnyz.com/ or send me a mail: . FB - (http://www.facebook.com/coderbunnyz)

There are several online free resources.  They range from short visual more game like tasks, to more traditional text coding.  Depending upon the age these typically do a good job of breaking it down and slowly building skill.  With 15 mins of googling you can find them all.

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