I was typing programs from the book "BASIC Fun" when I was in 2nd grade.
I distinctly remember that the concepts of infinite loops and INPUT A$ was like discovering gravity. Heady stuff.
Self taught, my progress was glacially slow, although I did reach a point in a program where I wished that GOSUB took variable arguments, which in retrospect meant I understood function pointers.
My early goals included writing LONG programs. A lengthy program not a bad goal for a 7 year old because a program with a well defined spec makes the risk of failure too high. Anyone can write a long program and feel good about it and learn a lot along the way.
There was a whole genre of books for programming in BASIC for kinds from the 80s. That stuff is a great source of programming ideas. However I wouldn't recommend using BASIC even for a 7 year old-- lua has the simple feel of BASIC but it isn't broken crap.
