(one of the most well known and definitely the most weird personality in the ruby community) developed this new educational tool called Hackety Hack(I learn about this from the Atlanta Ruby User Group meeting I went to yesterday). It's for kids age 13 and up to learn how it program. I love it, the interface is cool, you can do cool thing with very few lines of code, and 7 lesson come preloaded with it. What a fun way to learn. It's like a much simpler Squeak, or a nicer JES(explained below). I wondered if my professor Mark Guzdial would be interested, he had his students develop a similar environment for an Intro to CS class called JES(I worked on this), so I wrote him an email. Waiting to hear back.
Whereas JES was very media centric(you can easily read and manipulate pictures, audio files, movies, etc.), Hackety Hack is web centric, you can easily download files, web pages, and even youtube videos from the web. This has got to keep the kids excited, right?
If you are new to programming and would like to learn, give it a try.
Update: Mark replied and sent me this link to the Media Computation course.