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[kirish43]

Can I weigh in as a simple teacher??

 I teach kids programming language that ARE NOIT used bye "real" programmers. I start the kids on Logo in Second Grade, we progress through Squeak, Scratch, Alice, Flash and Html. I teach those programming languages to teach life concepts such as: spelling counts ( a command misspelled means the program will not run), logic, sequence, learning how to use functions, methods,  and variables. I also teach some C.A.D. C.A.D. gives a nice visual reference to what x y looks like,  you would be amazed at how this has helped them in their Math classes.

Some kids are just visual learners and a visual interface helps represent their thinking processes. Let’s face it not everyone finds code in and of itself engaging. I see no harm in kids exploring or learning a variety of programming language at a young age. If they find programming engaging they will proceed on to learning more marketable languages.

Just my thoughts from a non-programmer. I  do really respect of all you-anything beyond simple html code looks very difficult to me.

[baash05]

Started on logo myself Logic is such a fundemental part of programming.
Having said that.  The stream is more about those kids that did go on to become programmers. Excellent. that you're teaching no better job.  (short of programming that is)

Oh as to complex. Coding is really the art of breaking things into smaller and smaller parts until they are so small they are yes and no. Practice looking at an apple as a subset of fruit which is a subset of seed and you're half way to Object oriented programming.  
A pointer is just an address and adding to it is like walking up the street.
An array is like a row of houses. Simple if you really think about it..

[davewa]

Teaching programming in ANY language will get kids thinking about the PROCESS of solving problems.  This is never a bad thing, imo.

You need not go whole-hog and write Activities, though.  Simple problems can be addressed with Pippy.  If you ignore the object-oriented stuff and use Python as a procedural language, it's probably no more brain-damaging than BASIC and no harder to learn (says me -- who never even looked at Python code three months ago).

But to write an Activity, you need to know how classes work, get inside the PyGtk library and understand the Sugar.Activity class.  That's an awful lot to swallow if you're trying to write your first program.  (As I found out it's even a lot to swallow if you're simply writing your first Python program.)  Save that for another course.

At the moment, I'm working on an Activity that helps teach the night sky and acts as an aid to a stargazer.  It's around 2500 lines of Python so far -- most of that a large data structure which is the star catalog.  It's a true Sugar Activity, though perhaps not a very robust one (it doesn't share, for example).  See http://olpcnews.com/forum/index.php?topic=1376.0 for details if you care.

Note that this program is written by a professional software developer (39 years experience) and amateur astronomer (8 years) and I chose this problem for my first Activity simply because I understand the algorithms involved and can easily detect if the program is generating spurious results.

It took me about a month to get the StarChart Activity to this point (roughly 75% done, based on what I eventually want it to do).  My "native" programming language is C++.  It would have taken me roughly the same length of time to write in that language for the Windows operating environment: there would have been less of a learning curve but more code to write to accomplish the same things.