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Scratch from MIT is designed to help with this: http://scratch.mit.edu/

For more formal programming Processing is a great learning enviroment: http://processing.org/

In both I would say the best method is to find challenges your son wants to undertake for himself. Learning to explore, play and fail is the way forward.

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FWIW, my roughly eight-year-old nephew is an avid Scratch enthusiast.

A couple of other things that might be worth exploring are the Android App Inventor (a Scratch-like environment for programming Android phones), and Hackety Hack (a Ruby-based environment for programming very simple webapps).

Thanks! I'll look at both of these

I'd never heard of scratch but that looks very interesting for an initial foray. Thanks for the links and taking the time out

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