>Thanks for your insight - and for the suggestions here from other programmers too. I see now that it is not just a choice of language but a choice of problem - we need to seek out interesting problems that are soluble at student's current abstraction level.

VB.NET would be perfect, C# woudl work pretty well too. You can write games and the like in VB.NET all you want. I never have thought Flash was all that great or intriguing. I'd rather have something you can really write programs with instead of small animations.

If you really want to him to get the fundamentals of programming, and use it in school (in my experience, knowing how to program and having to go to school did not work out well), get a copy of Mathematica.