A good way to ease into programming is to tweak something simple but graphical, For instance:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb203893%28v=xnagame...

has lots of numbers and some very basic animation that can be tweaked. You really have to grab their interest before going into writing something from scratch or learning the basics.

Javascript is not as forgiving as a first development environment. I would use VS/C#, Eclipse/Java, or Netbeans/Java because the static code analysis will highlight mistakes.