as others already mentioned, 8 is quit young.
I started with my 2 children when the were about 9 or 10, with RIS / 
Lego MindStorms.
Both could program the Lego Mindstorms within one hour.

My son with the most affinity to technics had seen all corners of RIS 
within 1 week,
and jumped to NQC (which he did for a few years).
After 2 years he switched to BASIC87 (very easy pic programming 
language, and somewhere there's a nice IDE for it).
After doing half a year BASIC87, he finally switched to JAL, PHP, ...

My other son, with the lowest affinity to technics (but much better at 
school, also in math and physics ;-),
has used RIS for 1..2 years, finally he switched to NQC,
and after 5 years, he still finds programming in NQC very difficult.

Stef

Buehler, Martin wrote:

>After getting some soldering experience, my son (8) would like to do
>more electronics.
>As many things are much easier to do using a controller instead of
>discrete logic, i would like to let him use pic controllers.
>As writing c-code is a bit difficult to learn for a guy who just learnt
>reading, i wonder if there is a simpler way to program a pic.
>Any recommendations?
>Thanx!
>tino
>
>  
>
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