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As another poster mentioned. If you have a mac you have a excellent set of tools for kids to learn with. Not quite Basic. But close enough.
sed
awk (a whole language in itself)
grep
bash
xargs
less
vi (!)
emacs (!)
etc.
Just show the kid how to do:
man awk
and let them go. They'll learn skills that they will have for life. They will eventually find gcc, perl, ruby and java and then they'll have something to move on to.
I remember way back in 86 trolling through old BSD Unix manuals as a freshman in college learning about all the wonderful unix commands. Sure I had a PC (DOS) on my desk and still had the old atari 800 back home with it's basic cartridge. But unix... there was some beauty, there was some structure.. Piping, redirects and shells... I'm still learning new stuff from /usr/bin
Huge amounts of examples throughout the whole system. Examples that actually make the computer work. Not just nice book code. But real, get the job done stuff.
If you don't have a mac just download any linux distro and install on an old machine. Any kid who has geek in his genes will dive into that with little prompting.
Not to pimp another author (I love Brin's books too):
http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html
